


Some Die Young

by appleheart



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Idiots in Love, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Philosophy And Snogging, War veterans, the code is more what you'd call guidelines
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-10-14 23:55:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10546516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleheart/pseuds/appleheart
Summary: "Couldn’t you have gone with 'How about a kiss for luck?' Or 'Hey, buddy, I’ll miss you too!'""I'm a Jedi. We don’t do things half-assed. And when we do, we don’t admit it."Nonspecific Old Republic era. A career soldier and a Jedi Knight navigate their feelings about life, death, war, and each other with the help of long-distance holoterminals and a lot of alcohol.





	1. Mantheyon

**Author's Note:**

> I started off wanting to write this grand philosophic treatise about the nature of love and your obligations to other people. It devolved into two asshole army vets sitting around talking about their past benders. Rated for language.

Corporal Parthavoh didn’t need to look to know whose elbow had just settled, cold and heavy, on his shoulder. Several members of Company 202 had prosthetic limbs, but the only one in the base cantina with woolen sleeves instead of a military uniform was the Jedi Padawan.

Not for much longer, Parthavoh’s traitor brain reminded him, because it hated happiness. Or maybe it was because the moons of Mantheyon produced exactly one local brew, and its flavor was somewhere between “regret” and “crushing regret.”

But the part where Padawan Llayl and Company 202 were going their separate ways—after three years sharing the same bunkers and battlefields—was the exact part that Parthavoh was trying to ignore. So he gave Llayl’s elbow with a companionable bump with his beer, as if they were just off-duty instead of drinking goodbye to the planet, and kept mouthing the jukebox lyrics. His queue had run out. The current song wasn’t good, but he didn't care enough to change it.

Llayl leaned over Parthavoh’s head to address the officer across the booth. “Sergeant W’noon. Permission to borrow the corporal?”

“Permission granted, Padawan,” she said. Four drinks in, the sergeant finally sounded like her old self, albeit drawlingly so. You had to look closely to see her hands trembling. In this dim ruckus, no one was likely to notice.

Parthavoh couldn’t blame her. After weeks of dry lips and dead eyes, W’noon was finally emoting again. With the prisoner exchange announced and the worry over, she could let herself get good and tight, whereas another person might have been tanked from the start.

W’noon aimed her bottle at the corporal. “Parth, we’ve got barracks breakdown at nineteen hundred hours. Don’t skip out.”

“Ma’am.”

Llayl removed his elbow. Parthavoh eased out of the booth. He considered the jacket slung over the back of his seat but decided against it. The press of bodies in the cantina was so close he’d bust someone’s nose trying to put it on.

Another company was due in on the half hour, but their C.O. must have let them go early. Generous, except that there was barely room to move already. One of those inexplicable surges that happen in a packed room all but knocked Parthavoh off his feet. Llayl steadied him. “Where to?” Parthavoh shouted in the padawan’s ear.

“Just a walk,” Llayl shouted back. “Unless you’ve got business.”

Parthavoh considered. He had barely a toe on the cantina’s sticky floor, upright only thanks to the padawan’s bracing arm and a fistful of his robe. “Nowhere I’d rather be.”

“After waiting an hour for you to quit sulking and come over to the bar? I’m not sure I believe that.”

Parthavoh hadn’t known his absence was marked. Llayl had seemed occupied, practically pinned to the bar by members of Company 202 toasting his impending knighthood. And Jedi weren’t supposed to have favorites, as much as Parthavoh wished otherwise. His sudden warmth was only partly due to alcohol. Quickly, before the grin escaped him, he forced a frown. “ _Brooding_ , not sulking. There’s a difference.”

“To the untrained eye, it passed for sulking.” The mad crush subsided. Llayl levered him back to his feet. “And it doesn’t suit you, Corporal.”

“Asshole,” Parthavoh muttered. The din drowned out the word, but Llayl recognized the shape of it on his lips and laughed.

Parthavoh meant to keep a hand on the Llayl’s sleeve, but the push and jostle ripped them apart. At least he never lost sight of the padawan for long. Republic military grooming standards enforced a general sameness that transcended nearly all humanoid species. In that crowd, Llayl’s pierced ears and long braid always set him apart.

The press around the door was unbelievable. It took Parthavoh several minutes to extricate himself. Llayl, having eeled through somehow, waited for him in the afternoon smog outside. He greeted Parthavoh with raised brows. “Just when I thought you’d gone back to avoiding me.”

That was fine. Parthavoh had taken those several minutes to work on his excuse. “I’ll have you know, Padawan, I was keeping an eye on the sergeant.”

“Alright, I’ll buy that. How is she handling everything?”

Now he could let himself grin. “She’s been messaging Tuuq all afternoon. I mean, Tuuq hasn’t replied yet, they’re probably still debriefing her, but just knowing she’s _alive_ and will respond eventually—well, you can imagine.” Probably. Jedi, even half-trained ones, were funny about emotional attachments.

The news arrived just hours before: Specialist Tuuq, W’noon’s girlfriend and Parthavoh’s partner in crime, missing in action since midyear, was (one) alive and (two) being exchanged. Llayl’s recall orders had been patched through at the same time. If it weren’t for that, Parthavoh would have been dancing on the tables, instead of trying to drink himself under them.

Dammit all.

Llayl was saying something about Tuuq being in medbay for a while. “But at least she’ll be on the same troopship.”

Parthavoh squinted at him. “That’s news to me. I just heard the prisoners were—” He sucked in a breath. “ _Padawan Llayl_.”

“What?”

“You did something.”

“That would be meddling.”

“Jedi mind tricks—”

“Shh. I pulled a string or two, that’s all.”

“You asshole,” Parthavoh repeated, but affectionately. “I’ve got to tell the sergeant.”

He started back toward the cantina door. Llayl caught his arm. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Why not?” Parthavoh pivoted. “You know she would—Are you just afraid of it getting back to the Jedi Council?”

It was a blind guess. Llayl rarely mentioned the Council which governed his Order, even to complain. (Which would be justified, considering the Council had neglected to recall him from the Outer Rim when the more experienced Jedi attached to Company 202 were killed. They left the half-trained padawan to figure it out on his own. They hadn’t even sent him updated orders, which pissed off the sympathetic troops no end.) But when Llayl hesitated, Parthavoh thought he’d hit the nail on the head.

Shit. Now _he_ felt like the asshole, sulking in a corner while his favorite person had been putting a good face.

And the company had been cheering him, assuming his long-overdue summons presaged a promotion. Double shit. What became of a padawan who didn’t get knighted in the end?

Now Llayl just looked at him. “Happy accidents happen sometimes,” he told Parthavoh. “Please just let this be one of them.”

Parthavoh held up a finger. “Wait right here,” he said, turned on his heel, and plunged back into the mayhem of the cantina.

A few minutes later he struggled out again, a little worse for wear, but brandishing a fresh bottle of Mantheyon’s best in a triumphant fist. Llayl had tipped his head back against the cantina wall, fingers laced behind his neck. Parthavoh made an elaborate bow out of presenting him the bottle. “Here you go, Padawan, with the compliments of the Two-Oh-Two. A little liquid serenity for your troubles.”

Llayl guffawed. He uncapped the bottle with a swift twist, took a swig, and went to hand it back. Parthavoh showed him the other two bottles shoved through his waistband. “Drink up while you can. It doesn’t ship well, and we’re sure as hell not leaving it for the Imps.”

“And we’d be cited for chemical abuse of the environment if we poured it out.”

“Sure. You were just doing your civic duty, letting them buy you that many rounds.”

“Were you really not going to say goodbye? With maybe an hour to go before we’re packed off to different corners of the galaxy?”

“Coruscant isn’t a corner.”

“Don’t be pedantic. That’s my routine.”

“I hadn’t expected you to notice.”

“Of course I did. What’s a party without a clown?”

Llayl was a smiler, one of those people whose face simply rested in a pleasant look. He gave off the impression of being an amiable if somewhat preoccupied individual, who liked everybody and was game for anything. That impression was mostly accurate. (He had cultivated a particular look of thoughtful affability to deal with difficult people. It had driven Master Nooibos up the wall. Parthavoh wondered if that was deliberate, but he never got a straight answer.) The closest Llayl came to ‘unhappy’ was a pinched look about the eyes, like a man staring into a sun, and a certain twist to the right-hand corner of his mouth.

The point was that you had to look for it, and Parthavoh hadn’t been. Now it hit him that Llayl had been a little ‘off’ from the moment he came over to the booth. While he had his easy smile on, he fixed on Parthavoh in a way that said he wasn’t kidding. Not really.

Had he actually been waiting for Parthavoh that whole time? Every time the corporal had glanced across the crowded cantina, someone else had been pounding Llayl’s back or refilling his glass. Parthavoh could have set off a hand grenade without interrupting the cacophony that was the Republic Armed Forces' farewell to Mantheyon. But as he mentally waded back through the three beers he’d downed so far, it seemed that each time he caught sight of Llayl, Llayl had been looking his way.

And for someone who always claimed the whole Jedi mindreading thing was a myth (except one late-night speeder run, when he said it was, perhaps, an _exaggeration_ ), Llayl sure seemed to know whenever Parthavoh was thinking about him.

It was just that after three years, Parthavoh had trained himself not to make anything of that.

If Llayl had noticed Parthavoh’s absence from the throng of well-wishers,  then he had also noticed his presence on the far side of the cantina. Parthavoh could hardly get away with claiming he hadn’t seen him. The warm glow of being wanted fled before the prickly shame of having behaved like a dick.

“I’d have come over eventually,” he said reluctantly. “I just… don’t feel like a party right now.” He waved around at the half-dismantled base, the troopships, the departing queues lined up before them. “Look, it’s just sudden, alright?”

“Life is always sudden, Corporal,” Llayl answered, with maddening steadiness. “Things happen very quickly and for no reason at all. You have to make your peace with that.”

Parthavoh couldn’t help it. His eyes dropped to the matched set of artificial hands emerging from the padawan’s sleeves. They gleamed like the bottle held between them.

“What’s on your mind?” Llayl continued, as if he hadn’t noticed the slip. “You’re upset.”

“I’m not upset. Can’t I have an off day?”

“In three years, I have never known you to have an off day. You’re normally the first one packed, ready for the next adventure. Even if it’s just another piece-of-shit outpost on the Outer Rim. It’s not like you to hang back.”

Parthavoh cast around for a distraction. The merciless patience with which Llayl waited for his answer reminded him of all the downsides of trying to be friends with a Jedi. What if he just spat it out, and blamed the beer for any consequences? He took a swallow, grimaced, and wiped his mouth.

“Maybe I’m having a hard time thinking about you leaving, alright? I’m about to lose my best friend, and I’m not even sure that ‘friend’ means the same thing to a Jedi as it does to an ordinary army grunt like me. You don’t even say the word.”

Llayl’s head jerked back like Parthavoh had shoved him. His long face went very still. “Hmm,” he said, as if that were a complete sentence. Which was still better than something like _A Jedi is a friend to all creatures of the galaxy._

They eyed each other. Parthavoh felt heat creep up his neck and wished, not for the first time, that Jedi suffered embarrassingly involuntary physical reactions like the rest of the galaxy.

At last, Llayl just said, “Walk with me.” He pushed himself off the wall with languid grace, like a heron stepping into flight.

It didn’t matter what the treaties said: Parthavoh’s superiors had no illusions about Mantheyon’s civilian population keeping any of the surrendered territory. Republic forces wouldn’t leave so much as a generator behind. When the scavengers swooped in—Imperial and otherwise—they would inherit nothing but shell holes and the odd duracrete embankment.

By common consent, the cantina was one of the last buildings on the base scheduled for breakdown. The departing troops rotated through it in shifts. But half the prefab buildings surrounding it were gone. The base they had defended for months was almost unrecognizable. Even the grating they had spent weeks laying over Mantheyon’s mud was slated to be ripped up and junked. Droid crews dismantled the command tents and barracks whose occupants had already shipped out. Technicians kept vigil in pools of light around the last remaining workstations. Parthavoh glanced automatically for that handsome radio operator from the 73rd. He had considered calling him up—fool around one last time, show there were no hard feelings—but in the end, his heart hadn’t been in it. He was glad of it now.

The pair ambled through the atrophying base, passing the third bottle back and forth after finishing their own. By unspoken agreement, they took their usual path, following the switchback to the local speeder pad that overlooked the base from a southwestern rise.

Just that morning, Parthavoh had checked the weather, wondering if they were due for a storm and whether he could talk the padawan into signing out a speeder one last time. Now he was wondering if they would ever cross paths again. The galaxy was a big place. He should know. Parthavoh had set foot on probably twenty different worlds since he’d joined up, and never been back to a single one.

Not to mention, Republic High Command gave no sign of pulling Company 202 back from the Outer Rim. There were probably lots of important places in the Core Worlds that could use a Jedi Knight as handy on a battlefield as Llayl. If they _did_ end up knighting him. Which was a possibility that Parthavoh had never considered before today.

That was the other problem with hanging out with Jedi. (Tuuq once complained how often Parthavoh said that— _that’s the other problem with Jedi_ —without ever explaining what the first problem was.) Spend a while living cheek by filthy cheek with them out in the ass-end of the galaxy, and the glamor wore off. But you started thinking about fate more often, and the push and pull of the universe.

Parthavoh was not used to introspection. He preferred it that way. He liked the army, where you took each day at a time, and there was no point in speculating what was coming down the pike at you because you couldn’t do a fucking thing about it anyway. He liked the routine of weapons drill, rotating shifts, and sleeping in the same prefab barracks every night even if the planet underneath him changed every few months. He liked alternating familiar ration packs with bizarre local cuisines. He even liked orders, though he’d never admit that for the sake of his troublemaking reputation. He did _not_ like having to look at his own future and weigh up his chances of happiness.

Jedi. They rubbed off on you.

At the top of the rise, they found their speeder pad a fresh ruin. Carefully laid charges had shattered the duracrete slab. Fractured planes fell in on themselves in a brand-new crater. Charred bits of nav beacon circuitry showed at the bottom. The smoke and floating dust from the detonation thickened the natural Mantheyon haze, obscuring their usual view of the base below them. They could have been the only ones on the entire planet.

So much for one last ride. They wouldn’t have had time anyway. At least the broken and tilted slabs made for good, if chilly, seating. Parthavoh regretted his abandoned jacket and said as much. “Someone’s probably going to puke on it. Or bleed. That crowd was devolving fast.”

“Sad to miss the inevitable brawl?”

“A little.” Maybe that’s what he needed—just to pound on someone and get pounded back. No grudges, just _moving_ and _doing._ Not this sour knotted feeling he didn’t have words for, or at least none that felt right in his mouth. He could sort those out in the medbay while the droids reinstalled his teeth.

Llayl nudged him to pass the bottle. “You might still get to take a swing or two before you ship out.”

“Fingers crossed.” He watched Llayl’s throat jerk as he took a swig. The last beer and a half had finally built up a good fog in his head to match the afternoon, but he wished he’d grabbed another on his way out the door. Glum reality wasn’t far enough away yet. “You won’t find booze this nasty on Coruscant. —Do proper Jedi even drink alcohol? I know Master Tacroy liked sitting in the cantina, but I figured it for a social thing.”

“Sure, sure. Some Jedi imbibe. Out of fancy snifters, in aesthetically harmonious water gardens.”

“So I shouldn’t talk about the Padawan’s Last Keg Stand.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Even if it would make a _great_ addition to Jedi legends.”

Llayl shook his head, laughing. “Let’s leave that story in the Outer Rim where it belongs. Do you remember the jellied vrblther-eye shots that had you shitting green for days?”

“I regret nothing. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“I have no doubt you’ll find some equally horrid regional delicacy wherever you’re bound.”

“Now you’re getting my hopes up.” Parthavoh gripped Llayl’s shoulders with tipsy intensity. “If you come across anything fun, you _have_ to ship it to me. Promise.” Llayl promised, still chuckling, and Parthavoh slowly let him go.

This was more like it: sitting in their usual spot, sharing a drink and talking about nothing in particular. Even if their usual spot had become a crater and Llayl still had that tightness about his smile. Parthavoh decided to pretend this was just another redeployment and that they were shipping offworld together like a dozen times before. He leaned back on his elbows, letting his legs hang off the slab. “I’m actually going to miss the busted comm relays,” he ventured. “The biweekly speeder run to Besh Outpost was my favorite part of this posting.”

The padawan picked up his cue. “Ah, yes. Whiplash Bend will live on in our memories. —I’ll miss the way the air tastes like the back of a refrigeration tanker all the time.”

“I’ll miss the broken sensor on the east gate going off day and night.”

“I’ll miss breaking ice off the leaky showerheads in the morning. In particular, I will miss people asking me if Jedi feel the cold, _every single morning._ In case I never answered that question to your satisfaction, Corporal, the answer is ‘yes.’”

Parthavoh snickered. “They should include this when they ask for volunteers for joint ops. Get insights from a real live Jedi! Uncensored! Unabridged!’”

“I’ll miss being part of the company. I really will.”

“Yeah. It won’t be the same without you, Padawan.”

That quickly, the illusion of normalcy was broken.

Parthavoh sat up, brushing gravel from his back. Llayl passed him the bottle. One last swallow sloshed in the bottom. He downed that and went to throw the empty bottle into the crater. Swiftly, Llayl blocked his arm. “Third Platoon planted mines,” he explained.

“Oof. Harsh. What if it’s some civilian trying to salvage the beacon chip?”

“They left a sign. See?”

Now he did. “So in other words, there might _not_ be mines.”

Llayl looked unfocused for a moment: a look that the troops had learned meant Serious Jedi Business, Do Not Disturb. Then he shook it off and said, “Let’s not find out the hard way.”

“Sounds like your mystic powers need recalibrated.”

Parthavoh set the bottle on the ground instead and draped his throwing arm around Llayl’s shoulders. He wasn’t good at doing things the tactfully oblique way, even completely sober. Better to be blunt. “So. You’re worried the Council won’t make you a Jedi Knight, even after all this.”

Llayl, slouched against him,  waggled a hand back and forth: _sort of, maybe, not quite_. “I’ve thought about it. It’s not like getting, say, a pilot’s license—you pass your exams, you log however many training hours, they give you a badge…” When he shrugged, his metal shoulder dug painfully into Parthavoh’s armpit. “They might not consider me ready for the Trials of Knighthood yet. Or ever. Master Nooibos certainly didn’t think much of me.”

“It wasn’t your fault that she and Master Tacroy were killed. Or that the Council didn’t send anyone else.”

He didn’t mention Council not bringing their padawan home sooner. Parthavoh had figured out long ago that it was Llayl’s decision, in the absence of orders to the contrary, to remain with Company 202. Llayl could have gone back to the Core Worlds if he wanted. Instead, he’d followed the company from posting to posting around the Outer Rim, fighting their battles in place of his dead masters.

Maybe now Llayl thought that was a mistake.

But Llayl just answered, “I know it wasn’t,” as if he had no need of Parthavoh’s reassurance. “What I’m saying is that months of spiritual isolation, unsupervised, after the violent death of a less-than-approving teacher, hardly make for ideal apprenticeship conditions.”

“Bullshit. You’re something to see in a battle. There are probably full-blown Jedi Masters who don’t have as much frontline experience as you.”

“I’m sure that will come under consideration, but there’s more to being a Jedi Knight than just chiffonading your enemies with a lightsaber.”

“Sure there is, when there’s not a fucking war on.” Something occurred to him. Parthavoh took his arm back to better peer at the padawan. “You’re not feeling the booze at all!”

“No. Sorry. We can… neutralize the effects somewhat.” He waved away Parthavoh’s mock outrage. “You were right about Master Tacroy being a social drinker. I liked the thought of ‘liquid serenity,’ though. That was clever.”

Parthavoh scoffed, but let it go. “Anyone but you and I’d think they brought me up here to take advantage of me.”

“Perhaps a little.”

“Apparently that’d be a better use of your time!”

As jokes go, it wasn’t that funny, but the longer Parthavoh thought about it, the harder he laughed. Llayl had on his thin-lipped, humor-the-idiot smile, which didn’t help.

No, dammit, he was supposed to be supportive. He wrestled down the grin and the buzz, and levelled a finger at Llayl. “Alright. Look. The point is, you’ve done a damn good job here. All the Two-Oh-Two would agree.”

The ironic smile didn’t change, but Llayl’s brows rose. “And if it were the Two-Oh-Two sitting on the Jedi Council, I’d be set.”

“Want us to write a petition? We will.” That failed to win a laugh. “I mean it! If this has been bothering you, you could have said something.”

He thought of Company 202 gathered around to honor their padawan. Their collective, peculiar little brother, never mind that he was older than most of them, Parthavoh included. On and off the battlefield, they would miss him. For most of them, the sense of loss was only tempered by their vicarious pride in his long-deferred, justly-earned promotion. Did Llayl understand that? The Jedi hadn’t raised him to form bonds outside of the Order, and from what Parthavoh knew of his masters—Well. “No one would think less of _you_ ,” Parthavoh insisted.

“I know, Corporal.”

Llayl looked away, as if he could see through the haze to the cantina below them. Maybe he could. The man didn’t match Parthavoh’s childhood image of a Jedi in a lot of ways, but the way he got cagey about what _exactly_ the Force was and what it could do—that was one hundred percent classic Jedi bullshit.

“Let them have their fun,” Llayl told him. “I wanted this conversation to be private.”

Parthavoh eyed him, fumbling for the right words. This is why Tuuq took point in every stunt they pulled. If he’d known Llayl would come collar him, he wouldn’t have tried to match Sergeant W’noon drink for drink. Cheap Mantheyon swill. The buzz always wore off too fast and left a queasy tangled feeling. The only cure was to keep drinking, and right now Parthavoh would rather sober up. 

He’d left his water canteen in his jacket pocket, of course. _Shit._

“To hell with it,” he said at last, striving for ‘jovial,’ probably only achieving ‘awkward.’ “I know you a lot better than some old farts levitating paperweights on Coruscant. You’re gonna be great. At whatever. They’ll see that.”

Thankfully, Llayl spoke up before he got any more tongue-tied. “It’s alright, Corporal. The Jedi Council may not approve of all of my choices, but their decision isn’t what worries me.”

Well. That blew his impression of the conversation they were having sky-high.

“What does, then?”

The padawan didn’t answer. More slowly, Parthavoh asked, “What choices?”

Llayl slid off the duracrete slab. He crouched down and cleared the nearby ground of rubble with a sweep of his arm. You never got used to seeing things move _past_ the end of his metal fingers. The back of Parthavoh’s neck prickled. He rubbed an uneasy hand over his horns.

Llayl straightened and faced him with a sigh that was little more than a settling of his shoulders. “I’d rather not crack my head,” he said. “If you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t, until you got all weird just now.” The knot in his stomach tightened. He had only seen Llayl behave like this once before, all quiet and cool and disjointed, wearing that pinched faraway expression. When Master Nooibos died, and Llayl was the last one left. “If this is Jedi business, you should be talking to Command.” Again the padawan said nothing. “Padawan, _is_ this Jedi business?”

Llayl made that noncommittal hand motion again. “Would you please take your gloves off? They’ll make it harder to explain.”

“Explain _what_?”

“If you punch me in the face,” he said, and continued, as Parthavoh’s mouth fell open, “It’s easier to claim a stumble if I don’t have standard army-issue knuckles imprinted on my orbital ridge.”

Parthavoh stared. He picked up the empty bottle of beer, peered through the muddy glass, gave it an experimental slosh. No answers. “Padawan Llayl, why the _hell_ would I punch my favorite person on the whole damn planet?”

Out of everything, _that_ got a brief, real smile. He couldn’t imagine why. “You swing when you’re caught off guard,” Llayl said dryly. “Just because I don’t _participate_ in the bar fights doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to how they start.”

Parthavoh couldn’t even argue that. With each bewildering pronouncement, his urge to knock the world into a less confusing shape grew stronger. Instead he folded his arms, wedging his fists under his elbows. “C’mon, Llayl, it’s cold and you’re freaking me out. Let’s go back down. I won’t tell W’noon anything.”

“Please, just give me a moment. I’m sorry.”

And like a sucker, Parthavoh stayed put.

Llayl paced a short stretch away from the ruined speeder pad and back again. He regarded the obscured vista and shook his head. “I thought about not going back to Coruscant at all. Just to have a little time. But the Force moves us where we must go... The trouble,” he said, very softly, “is that no master can ever teach you what to say in a moment like this.”

Parthavoh looked at the man he had spent the past three years learning to depend on, standing there so still and straight-backed on the rise, the smog a wall behind him. All at once, their solitude seemed threatening.

He wished he had stood up when Llayl did. Sitting like this, the angle was all wrong to get the blaster out of his hip holster. And while Parthavoh hated that he even _thought_ about drawing a weapon, he hated even more learning what Llayl looked like when every faint smile had left him.

“What are you about to tell me?” he asked, matching Llayl’s quiet tone. “If it’s not Jedi business. It’s something else.”

He didn’t want to say the word. It felt like an oil slick on his tongue. Once said, it could not be unsaid. Like the word _traitor_.

“Are you turning into a Sith on me?”

Llayl’s eyebrows shot up, which was a little reassuring, but not much. “Forgive me for being pedantic at a time like this, but in that case, I’d be a Fallen Jedi, not a Sith. Different ideology.”

“It doesn’t roll off the tongue,” Parthavoh answered stiffly.

Llayl nodded. “True. It lacks poetry. Corporal, you can stop sliding your hand toward your blaster. I can tell what you’re doing and it’s not necessary.”

“I’ll believe that when you stop talking like this!” The personal comm on his belt gave a chirp, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off the padawan long enough to acknowledge the transmission.

As a friend, he couldn’t believe it. But as a veteran of the Outer Rim, Parthavoh had seen some weird shit in his time. Had seen a Sith warrior once, across a battlefield, and he never wanted, ever again, to see what the Force made of a person gone black in the heart. He couldn’t reconcile Llayl with that. But how did such a person begin down that road? Maybe talking strange and grim on a quiet hillside, facing a future they didn’t want. Parthavoh was too much of a soldier not to assume the worst. And while going up against a wigged-out Force-user singlehanded, more than a little sloshed himself, wasn’t a _promising_ battle plan, he couldn’t do nothing. Sometimes the battles picked you.

But why tell him at all, a part of Parthavoh wondered. Why arrange a happy ending for Tuuq and Sergeant W’noon? Why bother yanking Parthavoh out of the cantina to confess to him, when Llayl could probably have commandeered whatever ship they put him on without anyone being the wiser until it was too late?

The rest of Parthavoh focused on getting his slow-moving fingers around the grip of his blaster. Maybe he could wing him.

“There is no passion, there is serenity,” Llayl murmured. He held up his hands, as if expecting them to tremble. Of course, being artificial, they were rock-steady. “I’ve spent so long practicing serenity that I forgot what it’s like to be nervous.”

“Llayl, _talk_ to me. I swear I will shoot you if you don’t.”

The padawan refocused on him. “Oh. You’re serious? You think I'd—?” Something like the normal smile came back to his face. “Corporal, let go of the blaster. I’m not a traitor and I’m not a threat. All I want you to do is listen for a minute. Less, I think.”

“You have my full and undivided attention,” said Parthavoh, without moving his hand.

“Splendid.” Llayl drew himself up like a soldier. “Well, then: I brought you out here to tell you that I love you, and I would very much like to kiss you before we go our separate ways. Permission granted?”

He’d thought that secret evil machinations were the very last thing he would expect of Llayl.

He’d been wrong.

“ _What?_ ”

“Permission to kiss you, Corporal?” Llayl repeated patiently.

In his astonishment, rigid with shock, Parthavoh said the first clear thing which came to mind, which was this: “Strictly speaking, Padawan, I’m not your commanding officer.”

Llayl’s eyes creased. “Well, then,” he said again, but softer this time.

He stepped closer to where Parthavoh sat. When he touched Parthavoh’s face, a static shock leapt from his cybernetics. Both of them jumped. Llayl gave a startled laugh, bent down, and pressed his lips against Parthavoh’s mouth.

A moment only. Then he stepped back. Parthavoh was frozen. The padawan braced his feet and folded his hands behind his back in an unmistakable military parade rest. “Carry on, Corporal,” he declared.

In the silence, the slowly curling smog was the only thing that moved.

The longer that silence went on, the wider Llayl’s grin grew. His eyes were so clear and bright.

It struck Parthavoh suddenly: this was it. _This_ was the only real smile he had. Everything else had been a polite fiction. And if this was it, then he had never once seen Llayl truly happy before.

That thought _hurt_.

“—Oh for _fuck’s sake_ sit down!” he snapped. “I’m not going to hit you.”

Finally, Llayl dropped that awful awaiting-execution stance. He reclaimed his seat on the other side of the shattered slab.

It came to Parthavoh then that earlier, he had slung an arm around Llayl, leaning against him, because that’s what they always did. No one thought anything of it. Now he was humiliatingly aware of what had been reflex, and aware that this time, when Llayl sat down, he left a careful space so that their knees would not brush.

His next thought was that Llayl had moved for his sake, no doubt reading Parthavoh’s lack of reciprocation for aversion. He groaned and dropped his face into his hands.

He should—he _would_ , if it were any other reasonably congenial gentleperson on the planet but this one—grab him and kiss him back until they were both breathless, drunk on something better than the local brew. He wasn't used to hesitating. And Llayl would know that.

And it wasn’t as if—

Not like he didn’t—

—but his head was spinning, not with Llayl’s quiet familiar laugh, but with _Jedi Jedi Jedi, Do Not Touch_ , so many flashing _Danger! Keep away!_ signs that everything was red.

Then again, that could just have been the blood rushing to his face. He decided to stay behind his hands until he was no longer at risk of spontaneously bursting into flames. Even if that took forever.

From the very start, Llayl warned him that whatever hopes Parthavoh might otherwise have entertained in his direction were doomed to disappointment. And from then on, Parthavoh had tried to respect the rules by which Llayl lived—had tried so hard, when it came as naturally as eating with his toes. Apparently he had been more successful than he knew. Because now, when he should just be kissing him _stupid_ , all Parthavoh could think was, _what have we done?_ On behalf of every single trooper in Company 202, he owed Llayl an apology. They should have shipped him back to his own people with his master’s coffin .

If it had been a Sith thing, he could have shot Llayl in the leg and talked sense into him.

From the unbearable world just past his fingers, Llayl’s voice sounded humorous again. “This is the sort of thing that might vex the Jedi Council. You understand now? I apologize for alarming you.”

Parthavoh steeled himself and peered past the edge of his thumb. Llayl was sitting crosslegged beside him. His artificial hands didn’t give away as many cues as flesh-and-blood ones. There was no way to tell whether he pressed his fingers together from tension or simply in meditative posture.

But no—he was still smiling like that, grinning at nothing in particular. He seemed unaware of being watched. He raised a hand briefly, pressing his fingers against his lips, as if trying to wipe the daffy grin away or else tack it in place. That seemed unforgivable to Parthavoh—that Llayl could smile like that with no one to see it.

His comm went off again. Both of them ignored it.

Letting his own hands drop, Parthavoh sat upright. He could salvage this. Had to.

“Look, Padawan. —Llayl.”

That was all it took. Llayl’s name in his mouth, unadorned, almost ended his resolve. He tried again.

“Look, it’s alright. Um. I. Let’s just….” That led nowhere, and his face was flaming again. “I’m, uh, I’m _flattered_ , but. Um.”

As soon as he started talking, the incandescent look had faded, replaced by Llayl’s ordinary nice-weather-we’re-having smile. Probably it was in his eyes still, bubbling up, but Parthavoh couldn’t risk making sure. He fixed his eyes on Llayl’s long nose, but that was too close—his mouth was worse still—settled for addressing the rings in the padawan’s left ear and hoped it wasn’t too obvious that his own ears were scorchingly hot.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Llayl shake. That asshole was _laughing_ at him. Parthavoh would have been offended if he didn’t feel so guilty.

“You don’t have to be afraid, Corporal. It’s nothing you’ve done wrong.”

Llayl was wrong about that, but there at least Parthavoh could get his feet under himself. He knew how to approach this now. Not as a Jedi would have handled it (he understood, now, why Llayl had fumbled for so long) but as Parthavoh would if the transgression belonged to a fellow soldier. Like he would say to a raw recruit, forgetting for the moment the years Llayl had on him, he declared, “It’s gonna be fine. We won’t report this.”

Llayl made a choked-off sound that maybe wasn’t a laugh this time. Parthavoh continued firmly, glowering at the vague horizon because he could not, in a thousand years, look at the man’s face and say what had to be said. "You’re frankly not the first kid to panic and say things you don’t mean. I get it. You’re scared of leaving alone, you got carried away, it happens all the time. When the nerves wear off and you’re all settled up with the Jedi Council, things’ll look better.”

“Parthavoh, I mean it, I love you,” Llayl interrupted, just before Parthavoh launched into what would probably be an embarrassingly patriotic speech (and if calling Llayl’s name had almost wrecked Parthavoh, hearing his own name in Llayl’s mouth, stripped of the formality of ranks and titles, finished the job. He didn’t know what damn fool thing he would have done if the padawan hadn’t kept talking.) “This isn’t nerves talking. I’ve been considering telling you for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Eighteen months.”

That was when the last queasy knot in Parthavoh’s stomach disappeared. Now he felt like he had no stomach at all, and was falling into a void. He turned his head and met Llayl’s half-smiling gaze. “Although, by some standards, that _is_ getting carried away,” Llayl added.

Eighteen months. Parthavoh counted back, trying to remember when exactly that put them, which posting, whether something had happened—

But Llayl was still talking. He was perfectly composed now. And that was the other problem with Jedi (Parthavoh thought of Tuuq and had the mad urge to laugh, and then to punch something), that Llayl could be the very picture of mystic calm, while every word out of his mouth was heresy.

“I had to be honest with myself and admit that I was in love with you, and that took a while, because when you’ve been raised to think you shouldn’t feel _anything_ … But what you have to do is train it. Like shaping a tree’s branches instead of cutting it down. And after that, I had to decide whether actually telling you would be wrong.”

“You’ve been thinking about this—” He wouldn’t say the word. “—for half as long as we’ve known each other, and you choose _now_ to say something?”

“To be honest, I only decided about an hour ago. Outside the cantina.”

“No shit. Really?”

Then he knew, and his stomach dropped further, even before Llayl nodded. This wasn’t the company’s fault. It was his own.

“You were upset to think that I might not care about you. As if you were just part of the company to me.”

Oh, hell. He’d manipulated Llayl into this without even meaning it. He should have stayed in the cantina—No, he should have sucked it up and gone over to toast Llayl like the rest, then he wouldn’t have doubted—

Eighteen _months_? No. Whatever Parthavoh did today, the damage was already done. What he should have done was let the Jedi take care of their own padawan. Not badgering him into joining the company in their off-duty hours, not teaching him to play pazaak and to hold his breath when he downed a shot so it didn’t burn going down. Not volunteering to be his backup when the comm relays went down and messages had to get to Besh Outpost. Not wanting him warm and laughing rather than quiet and remote, not looking for ways to make him laugh. Not radiating affection at this affection-starved kid (there he went again) when it was for his own good to grow in barren soil.

More roughly than he liked, Parthavoh snapped, “So to make _me_ feel better, you’re breaking your oath.”

“It’s a Code, not an oath,” Llayl corrected him. “And I don’t believe that I am.”

He snorted. Llayl held up his hands, silently asking for patience. “Absolutely, it’s not what is _expected_ of a Jedi. But I don’t believe that the Jedi Code itself forbids me to feel the way I do about you. Believe me—” His voice dropped. “I’ve spent a long time thinking about this.”

“‘There is no emotion, there is peace,’ and all the rest. That’s all just noise?” Parthavoh’s comm was chirping again.

“Look who’s been paying attention!” Llayl flashed a grin. “But what about the harmony-chaos dichotomy? Chaos exists. Entropy is a part of nature. The harmony of the universe encompasses the presence of chaos.”

“That is a level of philosophy above my pay grade, and you don’t get to use it to seduce me.”

“My point is that you can’t just say the Code and...” Llayl snapped his fingers. “Done. It’s meant to be a process. It’s something you train yourself to do, like firing a blaster. The first and third maxims sound the same, don’t they? If you just listen to them and nod and move on?” He drew himself up, eyes going vague, and quoted. “There is no emotion, there is peace… There is no passion, there is serenity.” He refocused on Parthavoh. “There, now you’re ready to take on all the evils of the galaxy! But _peace_ and _emotion_ —well, emotional—those are states of being. _Passion_ and _serenity_ , they’re not states of being, they’re reactions. Trained responses. You can react, but you can’t… never _feel._ ” A rawness had crept into his voice. “ _I_ can’t. And, Corporal, ill-advised keg stands aside, I am very good at responding with serenity. More than any of my masters.”

Parthavoh remembered. He remembered Master Nooibos punishing Llayl in countless minor and smoothly justifiable ways for his steady grace, which she believed to be a charade. She had been determined to break it, to prove his unreadiness.

“We flinch when a bomb goes off,” Llayl went on. “We laugh when we hear a joke. We smile when we see someone we like. We have preferences for our food, our sleeping accommodations, our assignments. That is part of being a living, thinking, feeling person. Being a Jedi means not giving into that first, instinctive reaction and letting it dictate our course. We are not slaves to passion. We respond with serenity.

“And love,” he said deliberately, “isn’t an emotion, or a reaction. It isn’t an obsession. It’s not the same as lust or longing. It’s a _behavior_. I behave with love toward you, and I choose to continue doing so. I can’t claim otherwise.”

Parthavoh had put his face back in his hands. He knew what Llayl would look like right now: chin up and face burning with that certainty he got in the middle of battle, all calm and clear and terrible.

As the picture formed in his mind, half imagination and half memory, it hit him again that those days were done and he would never see that face again. He hunched over his propped elbows.

It was the word “love” that threw him. Llayl said it so easily, as if it didn’t make Parthavoh break out in goosebumps. His best friend, who couldn’t say the word ‘friend’ back at him, now laying claim to that word that had led to wars, betrayals, and desertions for thousands of years.

If Llayl had just wanted to mess around with someone he knew shared his inclinations before leaving it in the Outer Rim with all the other stories best forgotten, that was one thing. Parthavoh wouldn’t have thought twice about it. What were friends for? But he couldn’t put love and Padawan Llayl in the same place in his mind, not this fast, not after so long keeping the boxes separate. Insisting that they _were_ separate to Tuuq, who knew him too well and teased him relentlessly. Insisting to himself.

Parthavoh stole a glance. He wished he were less drunk, or more. If he just… leaned in…

He needed to move this conversation to safer ground, and fast. He’d been shot down over unfamiliar territory and he was desperate for a map. A signal flare. A semaphore, even. He cleared his throat.

“That’s… quite a speech. You’ve had a while to work on it, I guess.”

“No. Just about four months.” In response to Parthavoh’s questioning look, “Since I started thinking about actually telling you. The part about the difference between reactions and states of being was something I debated with Master Tacroy.”

Yes, he had the timeline sorted out now. Easygoing Master Tacroy, who had brought his secondhand padawan along to the Outer Rim, the price tags still on his prosthetic arms—Tacroy would still have been alive eighteen months ago. Then he died and Llayl’s training passed to Master Nooibos.

“Did he know it wasn’t just a philosophical exercise?”

Llayl shook his head. “Master Tacroy is—was—one of those people without any romantic or sexual impulses. Master Nooibos and I had it a little harder. She knew something was going on with the troops, but not quite who. I think she thought it was Tuuq.”

That made sense. When they had their way, Tuuq and Parthavoh were inseparable. “So that time when she forbid you to speak to anyone but the officers—?”

“Yes.”

“That was fucked up,” Parthavoh said, too angry at the memory to keep shutting Llayl down. He remembered, as though it were yesterday, his heart blistering like a coal inside of him, watching the padawan gagged by his master’s suspicion and meekly _accepting_ it. As though she had ordered him to let go of the rope that was keeping him from drowning, and all he did was sink beneath the waves with that quiet smile of resignation.

He remembered the hushed, furious arguments within Company 202 whenever their surviving Jedi were out of earshot. He remembered punching someone who didn’t even warrant it and wishing it were the Jedi Master’s head. One time he got Llayl alone, trying to make him talk. He even shook him. And Llayl had just looked at him so compassionately, as if _he_ were the one worried about _Parthavoh_ , saying only that he was doing well and thanking Parthavoh for his concern. He remembered (the coal burned hotter) the awful, guilty relief he felt when Master Nooibos was killed.

“You always do surprise me.” Llayl leaned forward, studying the lines that Parthavoh had been unconsciously tracing in the dirt with his feet. “Out of all the ways I considered this might happen, I didn’t expect you to argue with me.”

“But you did expect me to punch you in the face?”

“That was a few possible outcomes, to be honest.”

Parthavoh wanted to ask what other outcomes he had considered. The words were on his tongue. His eyes fell to Llayl’s mouth, and he swallowed the question.

Instead he said, only a little hoarsely, “I just know how important this is to you. Being a Jedi.”

“I'm still a Jedi.”

“You're a terrible Jedi.”

Llayl elbowed him. “What happened to your good opinion?”

“Do you seriously not see how anything has changed?”

“Not particularly. This has been true the whole time. You're just finding out about it now.”

His comm insisted that he acknowledge transmission. He shut it off. “You’re going to go up in front of your Jedi Council and have them pick over your philosophy and serenity and junk. You’re going to regret this ever happened.”

“A proper master would have ground this out of me, I’m sure. But Master Nooibos couldn’t, and Master Tacroy agreed with me, I think, at least in the more abstract applications.” Llayl smiled. “Just so we’re clear, are you trying to _protect_ me?”

“Yes! You bet your ass I am!”

“I broke my clown,” Llayl observed ruefully. “This is one of the reasons why, by the way. There’s so much generosity in you. You’ve always respected who I have to be, even if you don’t understand it.”

This from the man who also expected Parthavoh to punch him in the face. He threw up his hands. “It’s just—you’re really pulling out the big guns here. Couldn’t you have gone with ‘How about a kiss for luck?’ Or ‘Hey, buddy, I’ll miss you too!’”

“Parthavoh, I’m a Jedi. We don’t do things half-assed. And when we do, we don’t admit it. I’m telling you what’s true, not working my way up from a lie.”

“I get that, but _I_ still have to work my way up. I’m stuck on the idea of you having friends, period. That it did mean something, you know, that you always turned up when I was in a rough spot. That maybe I kept getting assigned to the speeder relay with you because you liked my company, and not just because the sergeant could spare me. That would seriously have been enough of a gamechanger for one day.”

“I love you,” Llayl said simply, and Parthavoh’s mouth went dry. “I don’t need you to protect me from that. Or love me back, or worry about me, or talk me out of it. I don’t need you to _do_ anything except believe I mean what I’m saying, so that when I’m gone… Well. I’m upholding the Code as I understand it.”

Llayl scuffed out the lines in the dirt, stood, and stretched. The loose sleeves of his robe fell back, revealing the cuffs of an army-issue undershirt and beneath, the wires and gyros in his wrists. The day they met, Parthavoh caught Llayl wincing over his new prosthetics and hauled him into the base medbay for a refit. The doctor there had a knack. She’d fixed up one of Company 202’s gunners after a cryogrenade took her left foot. At the time, all Parthavoh thought was that the new guy could use a friend, and it might as well be him.

And now here they were.

The padawan sank down on his heels in front of Parthavoh’s seat. He couldn’t look away for easy distractions now.

“The Jedi Code itself is simple, even if it’s not easy,” Llayl told him. “You could probably quote it to me if you tried. All the rest—the austere clothing, the training regimens, the celibacy— _that_ isn’t the Code. Those are things Jedi do because we think it will make following the Code a little easier. To focus, to avoid temptation. It’s the same reason why we’re taught to avoid attachments, as an extension of the passion-serenity dichotomy. We fear that caring for one person leads to fear _for_ them, which leads to selfish actions, jealousy, and anger. To a dark path. But here’s the thing: Jedi _do_ form attachments. They’re not necessarily romantic, they’re not necessarily sexual, but they happen. They take us from our families when we’re young, but we still end up with people we prefer over others, as much as we’re supposed to view everyone as equal. And we are given to masters and we are given padawans and that—that is the _foundation_ of how the Jedi Order replicates itself, right there.”

His cold hand rested, very lightly, on Parthavoh’s knee. The smile on his long face was sad and strange. “Do you know the moment of greatest danger for a padawan, statistically? The greatest chance they will fall into darkness? It’s when their master dies. We’re in a war, Corporal Parthavoh. I’ve lost _three_.” Very, very tenderly, he said, “I don’t think that telling you how I feel is going to be my breaking point.”

“Llayl—”

“My masters died suddenly, and violently, and without a chance to settle anything left unfinished. It’s… very likely that the same will happen to me.” Llayl took a deep breath. “And to you. So. When you believed that leaving you didn’t matter to me—that _you_ didn’t matter—all of a sudden, it seemed clear that whatever else I did, it would be better—be a greater good—for you to know the truth. If things happen. Which they always do. You should know that I loved you.”

For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Parthavoh, rattled and not yet sobered up, blurted out, “And the kissing?”

Llayl was too well trained to blush. His skin lacked red tones in any case. But all at once his face went _exceptionally_ bland and he took his hand back. He crossed his arms over his knees and rocked back on his heels. “That was me making peace with my own mind. Sorry.”

It hadn’t done much for Parthavoh’s peace of mind, and he wasn’t sure whether all the talking afterwards helped, either. Which was worse: three years of trying not to want someone, or detangling all that mess? How did Llayl even sleep at night? He opened his mouth just as Llayl said, “You have an easy out, at least. You’re past due back.”

“What? No, to hell with that, we’re not done here.”

Llayl up a hand. A moment later Parthavoh heard it too: the whine of a small vehicle climbing the switchback toward them.

“Shit.”

“Life is sudden,” Llayl reminded him.

“No. Not this sudden. There are rules of—of common decency!”

“It’s alright, Corporal. That’s all I wanted to say. We can go over the philosophy more later if you—”

“For fuck’s sake, don’t you think I might want to say something too?”

“What else is there to say? You’re off the hook.”

To Parthavoh’s bafflement, the padawan appeared to be completely sincere. Parthavoh stared. “I may actually punch you now,” he told Llayl, as a two-seater sped out of the haze and braked in a little spray of rubble in front of the ruined pad.

They got to their feet. Parthavoh recognized the driver as Private Bats B’anjh from his platoon. It saluted without dismounting. “Your comm busted, sir?” it called. “It’s nineteen-forty.”

Parthavoh checked his powered-off comm and swore. “W’noon’s gonna kill me.”

“Yes, sir!” Bats B’anjh agreed cheerfully. “The sergeant did the he’s-in-trouble-or-he’s-gonna-be line and everything. Looks like it’s the latter, sir.” With palpable regret, it patted the flare rifle clipped to the speeder mount.

Llayl cleared his throat for attention. “She suspected danger, but sent you with only a flare?”

“Well, Padawan sir, I’m not the sergeant’s favorite,” the private answered without hesitation. “If something got the pair of you, I wasn’t going to make it much of a mouthful. But if I found him just kicking his heels…” It rummaged in its thigh pocket and tossed over a black-market stim. Parthavoh, glancing at Llayl, would have fumbled; Llayl had not returned the glance, and caught it for him. “That’s to sober you up, sir. The sergeant’s compliments, unofficially.”

He wouldn’t pull this with any other officer, but W’noon would understand once he explained. Especially today, with the news about Tuuq.

“Go back to base, Private. Tell the sergeant it’s important, uh, Jedi business.” To Llayl, he muttered, “Now’s the time for some mind tricks, Padawan.”

“Why?”

It took him a moment to realize that Llayl wasn’t joking. As far as he was concerned, their conversation had reached its conclusion. From the speeder, Bats B’anjh intoned, “My orders are to bring you back with me, sir. I am to accept no excuses except for your verified and irreversible death.”

“This isn’t over, Llayl. I’m not done talking to you.”

Llayl looked surprised, but pleased. “Alright. If you like.”

“I’ll call—No, I won’t know where… Call me when you get to Coruscant. Please.”

Llayl nodded and said to Bats B’anjh, “Please give the sergeant Padawan Llayl’s apologies. I take full responsibility for the corporal’s tardiness.”

“She said you might say that, sir, but I still get to hog-tie the lazy bastard if he doesn’t hop to it.” The private was deriving an indecent amount of pleasure from its temporary authority. “And drag him.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Muttering, Parthavoh untucked his shirt and slapped the stim high on his side, where it wouldn’t show. He grabbed Llayl’s arm. “Call me,” he insisted.

“I will.”

Bats B’anjh powered up the speeder engine and gave the second seat a pointed thump with its fist. “Want me to loop back for you, Padawan sir?” it asked. “Should only be a few.”

“No, not yet. I’ll walk back. Thank you.” Llayl had on his usual, absently mild smile now. But he leaned, just the slightest bit, into the touch of Parthavoh’s hand. Parthavoh would never have noticed before today. “My regards to Company 202, Private.”

“Yes, Padawan sir. And may I say it’s been an honor serving with you, sir.”

“The honor was mine.”

Parthavoh thought about kissing him. He didn’t know about the rest of it, but that, at least, as a proper ending, had to be alright. The private wouldn’t say anything. But Llayl saw Parthavoh's eyes dart downwards and stepped back, freeing his arm from Parthavoh’s grip and both of them from his recklessness.

“Travel safely, Corporal,” he said. “May the Force be with you.”

“Yeah,” he said, helpless to say more. “You too.”

He climbed onto the back of the speeder, ignoring the private's recitation of all the ways Sergeant W’noon planned to penalize him. None were terribly likely, given that she had been slinging back drinks in the cantina with the rest of them only hours before going on duty. If it came to that, Tuuq was back, and Tuuq had never been above using her leverage as the sergeant’s secret girlfriend.

Parthavoh didn’t care about reprimands and punishment details right now. His head was swimming with more than any stim could fix. All his thoughts were back on that rise, that bombed-out speeder pad. There was no room to think about anything else. He twisted around on the speeder to keep Llayl in sight as long as possible.

Bats B’anjh noticed, of course. It fell quiet, and after a moment said, “I guess we’ve gotta get used to not having Jedi around again.”

Parthavoh didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

The last thing he saw, before the haze swept everything away, was Llayl stooping to pick up the empty bottle and putting it in the pocket of his robe.

  



	2. In Limbo

For days, Parthavoh struggled to reconcile his last hour with Llayl with all that came before. During PT in the troopship’s gym, he picked apart the conversation like a battle plan. In his bunk at night, he knotted his fingers tight behind his neck and replayed it like a vid on the backs of his eyelids. His memories formed a collage of dubious integrity. Each time it seemed a little different, and less believable.

It was the kiss in particular that bothered him. He knew it had happened, but lacked the sensate memory. The fact of it eluded him. It had been so sudden, so unexpected. Maybe his brain couldn’t keep up.

He remembered the gravelly switchback up to the speeder pad, but they had walked that path together dozens of times. He remembered the padawan laughing at him, but he always did that.  He remembered hefting the empty bottle to toss it and Llayl stopping him. He could even map out the composition of the moment: Llayl standing before him, poised on the balls of his feet like a boxer. Cold prosthetic fingers on his jaw, a static discharge that made them both jump, and an indrawn breath whispering over his cheek. But what he wanted to remember more than anything else, the warmth of Llayl’s mouth against his—that escaped him.

What he did have was the image of Llayl’s face shining like a live wire, like a sun, and a sharp-edged realization that he flinched away from contemplating too long, even now.

It was deeply unfair.

To make matters worse, there wasn’t much else to think about. News was censored, of course. The troopship offered limited space in which to drill. The few routine duties that fell to Company 202 required the brainpower of the average nerf. (Once, it occurred to Parthavoh that he seemed to do a disproportionate number of those duties. “Definitely not,” Corporal Kleveodi said promptly when he mentioned it. “You’re imagining things.”)

The problem (he decided, while shoving cargo around in the troopship’s massive hold, tons upon tons of materiel whisked off forsaken Mantheyon) was that no one was allowed to think about Jedi, even prospective Jedi, in terms of having lips or hearts or bodies at all. Everyone knew that. He _knew_ they knew, because every single member of the Republic Armed Forces had reminded him of that at least once, personally, since Master Tacroy brought Llayl into the company. There came a point when Parthavoh would not have been surprised to get a call from Republic High Command, just so that one of the big muckety-mucks with all the medals could look at him, with that skeptical expression that transcended species lines, and tell him that Jedi didn’t form personal attachments, _in case you weren’t aware, Corporal._

He’d never told Llayl about that. What would have been the point?

Until those final moments, he had never even been allowed to contemplate what it might be like to love Llayl.

The plain truth was that Parthavoh needed time to fit all this into his understanding of the universe. By the time he was ready to believe that Llayl really did love him, that Parthavoh’s own efforts over the years to _not_ fall horns over heels for the asshole might not be as effective as previously assumed, and that yes, dammit, he wanted to establish his own incontrovertible memories of kissing him—

—by that time, of course, Llayl was on his way to Coruscant, half a galaxy away.

 

* * *

 

Three weeks after leaving Mantheyon, Parthavoh shuffled through the troops queued for a turn at the ship’s communal holoterminals. As he approached, Kleveodi slid out of the one he had been saving. He gave Parthavoh a thumbs-up. Parthavoh nodded thanks and took his place, ignoring glares from the queue.

The holos on public terminals were patchy by default. Bouncing the transmission clear from the Core Worlds didn’t help. Llayl rendered as a vaguely familiar fuzzy outline in shades of blue. Apparently the signal was better on his end, though, because his first words to Parthavoh were “I see there’s been a change in uniform regulations since I left.”

“Cute, Padawan.” Parthavoh tugged his decidedly non-uniform pullover straight. “My platoon’s on rest shift. What time is it for you?”

“My apologies. I asked Corporal Kleveodi not to bother you if that was the case.”

“And I’d ordered him to wake me.”

“Still. How long until you need to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?”

He waved it off, smothering a yawn. “A cup of caf and I’ll be _holy shit let me see!_ ”

The holo achieved a surge of clarity. The changes in the padawan came into focus. Grinning, Llayl turned his head, showing off the freshly shaven left half. New geometric tattoos fractured the delicate curve of his skull.

“Hot damn! Talk about changes…”

“This was the Council’s suggestion. In honor of my other masters, since I had the one for Zayer Ket. The designs are my own.” He leaned closer to the transmitter, folding his ear forward with two fingers to expose the numerals for 202 tattooed there. Parthavoh whistled admiringly. “Thought you’d like that. You all had the final training of me, after all.”

“Bet your ass we did. The Two-Oh-Two will be tickled pink. –Do I get to tell them this time?”

“Go ahead.”

But the shorn half of Llayl’s head—as attractively inked as it might be—was not what had caught Parthavoh’s eye. “Let’s see the other side.”

Llayl grinned wider than a nexu with a full belly. He turned the other way. No padawan’s braid dangled above his right ear. Somehow that left him looking more unbalanced than the razor had.

Parthavoh hooked his feet around the chair legs and leaned back, miming applause. Llayl took a bow. The holo fuzzed out again. “Look at you,” Parthavoh said anyway, as if he could. “A real Jedi Knight at last. Congratulations. You’ve earned it.”

He had anticipated this call, of course. He had even calculated the average time from Mantheyon to Coruscant, not that he would admit it. He had hoped—feeling guilty for hoping—that the weeks apart had eaten at Llayl too, and that the padawan would contact him as soon as he had access to a long-range holoterminal.

He had not anticipated that Llayl would no longer _be_ a padawan by that time.

“Didn’t you just land yesterday?” he asked, arranging his expression into something that hopefully didn’t resemble that of a man who’d been counting hours. “From the way you were fretting, I expected the whole knighting rigmarole to be more… involved.”

“If I weren’t a Jedi, I’d call the Trials of Knighthood ‘unsettlingly brief.’”

“But nothing unsettles a Jedi, of course.”

“Of course,” the blue blur of the holo agreed. Parthavoh snorted. “Let’s say instead that I didn’t leave much of a dent in the seat.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Can’t. Secrets of the Order.”

“Never stopped you before.”

The signal stabilized. Llayl had on his _oh-you-rare-and-marvelous-idiot_ smile. “Before, Corporal, we weren’t on a monitored channel,” he said dryly. Parthavoh winced apologies. “You were right. The Council didn’t strenuously object to my checkered training. They need Jedi Knights with battlefield experience available for particular assignments. Most newly knighted padawans continue assisting their masters in their own work for a while, but that’s not a concern in my case, so… here I go.”

That took the satisfaction out of being right. If the Jedi were anything like the military, ‘particular assignments’ translated to ‘special ops.’ 

Parthavoh wasn’t going to confirm that with potential eavesdroppers no more than a sneeze away. Instead, he asked, “What are the odds you’ll rejoin the company down the road?”

“I’ll be here on Coruscant for a little while, going over details. After that, it depends on how much trouble you get yourselves into.”

“We can make trouble.”

“You don’t want to be in the kind of trouble that would make them send me.”

When he said that, he looked as tired as Parthavoh felt.

You couldn't just buy a round of drinks to lighten the mood when you had a few dozen star systems between you. So Parthavoh just said, “I’d always want them to send you back.”

He’d meant to say, _to me_. At the last moment, he stopped short. In the blue projection of the holoterminal, Llayl seemed so unfamiliar, de-braided and sheared. Traditional Jedi garb replaced the secondhand army duds he had always worn under his robe. The pleated layers of burlap and cashmere gave him an air of formality, and uncanny vulnerability. Now he looked like a real Jedi, with all the weight of honor that implied. Nothing like Company 202’s favorite castaway. The distance between them seemed more than lightyears could measure.

He didn’t look much like someone who would sit on a bombed-out speeder pad, sharing a beer with an army buddy.

Or like someone with whom Parthavoh had the slightest chance in the universe.

But Llayl simply gazed at him across the distance, eyes crinkling with affection. Then Parthavoh knew him again. There he was, the beautiful asshole who had stood with his hands folded behind his back, waiting to be punched for his audacity, radiating happiness like a solar flare. Parthavoh’s favorite person on that planet and any other the galaxy could offer.

A Sullustan lieutenant bumped Parthavoh on her way to a free terminal. “Tuck your ass in, Corporal, this isn’t a lounge—Hey, is that the padawan?”

Llayl heard and answered, “Jedi Knight now, apparently.”

Parthavoh recognized her from one of the other companies stationed on Matheyon. He didn’t know her name. She lingered, leaning over Parthavoh into the terminal’s recording field so Llayl could see her. “Good on you, Master Jedi. It was an honor to serve with you.”

She saluted. Llayl returned a formal bow. To Parthavoh’s surprise, she gave his shoulder a quick squeeze before going on her way.

He frowned after her, fumbling in the pockets of his pullover, then turned back to the holoterminal. “I guess I can’t call you ‘Padawan’ anymore either. That’s going to take some getting used to.”

“Please do not address me as Master Jedi,” Llayl said instantly. “I beg you.”

“You want me +calling your name?”

The suggestion of intimacy was intentional, but he still broke out in goosebumps.

Enough stalling. Time to address the Hutt in the room. Even though he would have _killed_ to have a private terminal for this part. He forced a breezy tone. “Speaking of which! Where are you calling me from?”

“The lobby of my hotel. You’d like it. Private bar, good jukebox selections. No ice on the showerhead.”

“The Jedi Council couldn’t spring for a room with a private holoterminal?”

“In-system calls only,” Llayl explained.  Parthavoh flung up his hands in exasperation. “Just what private calls would a newly-minted Jedi Knight need to make? They take us from our families young. If I had a living master, they would have been here with me for the Trials.”

“I know, I know. I just meant to put headphones in my pocket and I forgot.” Parthavoh ran his hands across his horns. His palms were clammy. “I guess this conversation is going to be a little roundabout on both sides. Anyway. Um, yeah. I mean, yes—my answer’s yes.”

“Your answer.” It didn’t sound like a question.

“... Is yes.”

It should have produced the singular worlds-burning grin he discovered that afternoon on the rise. Instead: nothing. No reaction. No movement of the holo. Maybe the transmission lagged out.

“Did I lose you?”

Shit. If the call dropped, he would have to get back into the queue and wait his turn. That could be over an hour. This late into his rest shift—

“I’m here, I just...”

It was that absolute stillness that had first fascinated him about Llayl, years ago. A powered-down droid had nothing on that conscious suspension. Precise in his pauses, deliberate in his motions, as though he were listening to music no one else could hear. (Once, Parthavoh had drunkenly voiced that thought. Llayl maintained that he could not actually dance. Parthavoh had never gotten him to prove it, whether by whiskey or wheedling or bodily carrying him to the dance floor.) The stillness was less appealing now when what he wanted was a smile. Parthavoh was a clown. He liked to make people happy, Llayl most of all. Why was he frozen?

“Corporal, I don’t recall asking you any questions that needed an answer,” Llayl said. He added, “Much less a proposal,” so quietly that Parthavoh might not have heard, if the transmitter’s recording device hadn’t registered his mouth movements and automatically bolstered the sound to compensate.

“You know what I’m talking about, though, right? What I’m saying is that I’m game. Let’s go for it.”

The holo was going in and out of focus, but he saw Llayl lean in, crossing his arms on what was probably a countertop in front of him. It looked bizarre, given that the counter itself failed to render. “I told you I wasn’t asking you for anything. Nothing has to change.”

“I know, you were giving me space to think about it, and—”

“I just wanted you to _know_ , not—”

“What, you were planning on making this big speech and then going off and _pining nobly_ for the rest of your life? Wait. Do not answer that.” This was awkward. “—Are you saying you don’t want…?”

“Honestly? No.”

“Ouch.” Parthavoh sat back hard. The air rushed out of him in a sharp huff. He rubbed his damp palms over his thighs, realized he was biting his lip, and looked back to the holo. “Seriously, Llayl, if you’re fucking with me, I gotta say this is a level of dickishness I will have a hard time laughing off.”

“It makes me so worried for you, Parthavoh,” Llayl answered, very quietly. “And I cannot be that selfish.”

“But you can be that stupid!”

Parthavoh stopped. Communal holoterminals, he reminded himself. Not that he was shy about his romantic pursuits, but then he’d never tried wooing a padawan—a Jedi Knight—over a public channel. The personnel on either side were busy with their own conversations, in their own little cubicles of simulated privacy, but that could change.

The tables had turned. But Llayl had used his name, not his title.

Parthavoh lowered his voice. “You think this is like a gift, don’t you? Something you can just… pass off to me, to do with as I like, as long as it’s out of your hands. I can box it up and shove it to the back of my locker and never use it, but whatever I choose, your part is over. You’re done.”

“I am _never_ done with you,” Llayl said. 

He didn’t raise his volume even a hair, but he spoke so fervently that Parthavoh glanced around as if the whole room had heard him shout it. He knew it at once for the kind of thing he would hold tight in his heart for years to come. The moment the words came out of Llayl’s mouth, he felt them burrow into him.

But it wasn’t enough.

“That’s not how it is for me, Llayl. Maybe it is for a Jedi, but I’m not one. I’m just a regular army grunt.” Parthavoh mirrored Llayl’s pose, resting his elbows on the terminal. He was keyed up now, wide awake, but that loose, unhinged feeling at the back of his skull meant he would pay later for the lack of sleep. “Someone says he—says something like this, and it changes things. It changes _me_.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

A crewmember exited the cubicle next to him. Her successor made their way down the aisle. The soldier to Parthavoh’s right had headphones in—lucky bastard—and was laughing at something no one else could hear. Parthavoh seized the opportunity to speak plainly.

“Look, Llayl. When you said you loved me? That was the single greatest moment of my life.”

“It didn’t seem so at the time.” Llayl looked down, then back up, smiling wryly. “We aren’t supposed to dwell on regrets, so I don’t. But I wonder how I could have handled that better.”

“It’s fine. I’m bad at the serious stuff.” He grimaced. “Obviously. I’ve never told anyone I loved him, okay? Especially not on the first date. Which that was not.”

“I know. I mean, I know you haven’t.” Llayl muttered, “Dates end in nice hotel rooms, not in craters.”

Parthavoh couldn’t respond to that last bit. His new neighbor settled into their cubicle with a grunt, glancing over the partition at Parthavoh’s holo while their own loaded. “How do you know about that?”

“We talked about this one night. You, me, Tuuq... Kleveodi... Atana.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I’m not surprised. In light of your recent revelation about Jedi and alcohol, you might want to watch your pours in the future.”

“You son of a bitch. I’m never drinking with you again.”

He said it as a joke, but Llayl answered somberly, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

This wasn’t going the way he expected. Parthavoh sank back in his chair, shaking his head. “Okay. You are sort of acting like I offered to piss in your caf cup, and you don’t know how to refuse without offending my ancestors or something.”

The holo stuttered, failing to sync. At least the sound was clear. “We’ve been to some weird settlements together.”

“Sure, but even I draw the line at piss-caf.”

“If someone put a garnish on top, gave it a fancy name, and charged you fifty credits, you’d try it.”

“Maybe. And now that we’ve established that we’re both fond of changing the subject, I’m telling you again that I’m up for this. What you told me? Right back at you. I want this to be a thing.”

He had practiced saying this a few dozen times, waiting for Llayl’s call. Of course, the flimsy with the wording wasn’t in his pullover pocket any more than his headphones had been. He did his best from memory. “For the record, I’m not asking you for anything you don’t want to give, either. So if this is it, if this call right now is as far as you want this to go, that’s fine too, I guess. But if you got to tell me how you felt, then you have to know how I do, too.”

“I… appreciate that.” Llayl shook his head. “But the fact that I have my own interpretation of the Code doesn’t mean I can’t see why romantic attachments involving Jedi are a bad idea.”

“I can be discreet! And the Jedi Council’s already given you the go-ahead. Sort of. I assume you didn’t announce this part of your time with the company.”

“It’s a bad idea for _you_ , Corporal.” Dammit, there went the titles again.

Llayl drew himself up. No wonder the Council had knighted him without a murmur. When he had a mind to, he could really nail that transcendentally remote expression. Parthavoh leaned in, as though he could take hold of Llayl through the holo and shake him. “You’re what, twenty-three?” Llayl asked.

“Twenty-f—No. This is completely irrelevant. You need at least ten years on me before you can play this card.”

“You’re so young,” Llayl said, so tenderly that it almost took out the sting. “This isn’t in your nature. You dwell in the moment. You don’t think, you just _live.”_

“Are you giving me reasons you don’t love me now?” Hopefully no one nearby was paying attention.

“Reasons why I _do_ , you asshole. I know you, remember? You’re so alive. So real. You aren’t made for waiting or pining. You break rules just enough to prove they exist. You don’t like uncertainty. You like having routine and knowing every song on the jukebox and enjoying good company.”

“Is that a euphemism?”

“Sorry, would you rather I discussed your sex life over a public channel?” Startled, Parthavoh cracked up. “About which I know too much,” Llayl added over his laughter.

There were so very many answers Parthavoh could make to that, none of which he did, because he was a grown man concerned with making a good impression. Not to mention that the general understanding shared by the companies on the Outer Rim— _if it’s off duty, it’s off the record—_ ended once they boarded the troopships. Now there was a cam mounted in every corridor. A whole beadledom of officers surveyed his conduct, not just a sergeant with only so much moral high ground on which to stand, given that she was dating one of her own subordinates on the sly.

But even if they had a private channel, he wouldn’t have voiced the jokes that sprang to mind. It turned out that bantering with Llayl was less fun when it replaced a conversation he had spent three weeks physically _aching_ to conclude. He sensed Llayl assembling reasons to pull back, to disavow his declaration and withdraw the heart he had held out on Mantheyon. At least until Parthavoh himself had dropped the subject.

Parthavoh couldn’t allow that.

He could be unselfish enough to let Llayl recant, if for one minute he thought he really meant it. But when Llayl spoke like Parthavoh was just a dumb kid getting into trouble? As if it were Llayl’s responsibility to enforce some sort of emotional curfew? Never. That wasn’t a good reason at all.

Especially not when he thought about the situation each of them were in, physically, in this moment. There was a difference between having privacy and being straight-up forsaken. Yes, it was aggravating trying to talk seriously about love when bumping elbows with strangers. But there was something about being surrounded by fellow soldiers, knowing that every single person around him had also tumbled from their bunks and ducked out of their duties for the chance to hear a beloved voice. Thieves one and all, stealing glimpses of the galaxy outside the troopship’s hull.

But Llayl was alone. He might have a plush hotel to linger in, but no friends to celebrate with him. No one to buy him a shot. Not even a master to tell him they were proud. And if Parthavoh understood the hint, the Jedi Council had earmarked their newest Knight for a lifetime of bloodshed—something he never openly said he hated, but then, he’d never needed to. Company 202 had figured it out.

In the middle of all this, Llayl behaved as though love were a grenade to be primed and thrown away.

It could be body armor, instead.

It could be a lifeline.  

Parthavoh gave up on discretion. Fingers crossed that his neighbors were busy with their own concerns and that the troopship’s monitors had bigger issues to overhear, like the thriving black market onboard. But if this was going to work, at least one of them was going to have to save up for a long-range personal comm.

“Look, Llayl, what I like is _you_. I like you in all the ways that a sentient and non-cannibalistic organism can like another. You know that. Why the hell do you think I was always telling you you were my favorite?”

“You didn’t mean it the same way.”

“I meant it every way I _could_ mean it with you. Except apparently I could have meant the whole.” The holo resolution didn’t need to be particularly clear to show Llayl shaking his head again. “If you’re about to say I’ll be happier finding someone else, I _will_ reach through this terminal. Somehow. Seriously, what else is worth waiting for? I’ve made a lot of friends. I’ve liked a lot of people. I have _enjoyed the company_ ,” stressing Llayl’s chosen terminology, “of a good number. But none of them have ever meant to me what you do. What’s the point in messing around, hoping I’ll be content with something less, when I know damn well that the one I want is out there feeling the same way I do?”

Llayl heaved a silent sigh, eyeing something beyond the range of the transmitter pickup on his end. Parthavoh waited while he tracked its motion. When it had gone, Llayl told him, “That wasn’t actually what I was going to say.”

“You had Jedi face on. You were going to say something.”

“I was going to say that it’s practically impossible for us to meet up again within the next year at least. Perhaps the next five. Perhaps ever, if the war continues the way it’s going.”

That was interesting. News about the larger course of the war seldom made it to the Outer Rim. When it did, it had been so mangled by patriotic propaganda on one side and scaremongering on the other that it was essentially meaningless. He wanted to ask for details, but that was the kind of thing that could get a call terminated, if anyone was monitoring. Besides, he recognized Llayl’s bait now. He just shrugged. “Sure. Okay.”

“Corporal, why are you smirking?”

“Am I?”

“Yes. That’s definitely what you’re doing.”

“Imagine that! If that’s your best argument, you’re done for.” Parthavoh tucked his hands into the sleeves of his pullover like a robe. Doing his best stock holovid Jedi impression, he quoted, “O foolish youngling, know you not that things happen quickly and for no particular reason?”

“You know that’s not Jedi philosophy. That’s just my own.”

“And you’re the only Jedi whose philosophy matters to me.” Llayl responded with a gesture the Jedi Council would not condone. Parthavoh returned it good-naturedly. “If that’s the case, and we’ve got all the reasons in the universe why this can’t possibly work out, then I feel good about taking my chances.” He shrugged. “Why can’t we be another happy accident?”

“How do I make you see what a mistake you’re making?”

“By your own admission, you’ve had a while to consider my character and whether I can be talked out of anything. I think we both know the answer.”

“You are _terrible_ ,” Llayl muttered.

Parthavoh kept talking over him, but he’d felt that thread of resistance snap, and he couldn’t keep from grinning. “Not to mention, for all the months you’ve been fretting about whether a crush makes you a bad Jedi, I’ve spent _three fucking years_ telling myself you couldn’t _possibly_ feel something towards me. Can you really be surprised that I won’t let you wiggle out of this?”

“I underestimated your blind optimism. Consider me chastened.”

“Was that your main objection? You thought you should be the only one wasting away from thwarted passion?”

“That was most of it, yes.”

“Look. You’ve got to let me make up my own mind.”

“I know. I will. I just don’t think this is what you really want.”

“It is.” Parthavoh corrected himself, muffling a yawn in his fist. “You are.”

And there went the signal again, the image fragmenting, perfectly timed for maximum aggravation. “I can’t be your boyfriend,” Llayl said out of blue chaos.

“Can’t you? If you’re making up our own Code already?”

“I’m not—I’m always going to be a Jedi.”

“And I’m in the Republic Armed Forces,” Parthavoh answered. “Signed up for life, stamped and sealed. Wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“I can’t disobey orders for you—”

“Same—”

“—and we could always be worlds apart.”

“I’ll meet you in the middle. Wherever that happens to be.”

“I can’t put your well-being above that of anyone else. I can’t promise to be there when you need me. No matter how much I want to. That’s the only thing I can promise—that I will want to.”

From a man who was distinguished even among other Jedi by wanting so little from life, that admission itself was enough.

“This is the part I was still working out when my orders came,” Llayl went on. “Can love ever be unselfish? Can I love without being afraid of loss? If you strip away physical companionship, security, and assurances of preeminence—can what remains still be considered love?”

That was for the philosophers to decide. The corporal leaned in, putting his mouth right next to the transmitter. “I dare you to find out.”

Llayl studied him for a long time. The holo jittered, came and went and came back again. Parthavoh held his breath. Finally, Llayl said, “I wish I had told you sooner.”

He had been secretly pissed about the same thing for weeks. When Llayl said it, the last lump of resentment in his chest melted away. “Better late than never,” Parthavoh answered, and meant it. “Are we done arguing about protecting each other now?”

“I think so.”

“It’s settled, then.”

Then there was nothing left to do but grin like idiots at each other.

By luck, and occasionally deliberate self-deception, Parthavoh had always been able to blame alcohol, cheap stims, or exhaustion for the way he felt in the padawan’s presence. Overwhelmed and reckless, silly and too slow. Now he didn’t have to justify that dizzy feeling anymore. Llayl filled his head, and at last, finally, he didn’t have to fight it.

It was still too soon to admit all the things that came to mind. Distance (and public decency, probably) put a damper on a lot of it. And telling Llayl that he’d sabotage this entire troopship if it put them in the same orbit faster was the kind of thing that would tie the new Jedi Knight back into knots. Parthavoh was too tired to go through untangling Llayl again right now. He settled for simply informing him, “The next time I see you, I’m gonna kiss you until you blister.”

Llayl’s eyebrows climbed skywards. “Your come-ons need work.”

“I just like when you make that face.”

“Alright, I can make faces. What other lines do you have?”

“Oh, I’ve got a few.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“You’ll have to wait. Some are better in person. There are gestures. Also, I’m supposed to be snoring right now.” Parthavoh propped his head on his fist, beaming sleepily at his lover half a galaxy away. Someone jostled him deliberately, and he brushed them off without turning. “So tell me about Coruscant. Haven’t ever made it that far in.”

“Well. Where to begin…” Llayl stretched, smoothing his hands back over his head. He seemed surprised to find stubble there. “It’s hard to tell whether it’s day or night. You only get to see the sky from the uppermost levels of the city, and the skytowers put off so much light that the clouds are always illuminated from below. Beautiful, though.”

“Send me a holocard.”

“Already on its way. There’s a rumor that if you spit a seed off the highest balconies, it’ll have time to germinate and bloom before it reaches the lowest level…”


	3. Separation

An army corporal’s salary only went so far. Parthavoh wasn’t going to be booking passage to the Core Worlds anytime soon, and purchasing his own ship was laughably out of the question. Besides, Republic High Command almost never granted outsystem furlough. Battle lines changed fast. Marching orders couldn’t hold for troops to hitchhike back from wherever they had scattered.

Instead, he borrowed Tuuq’s camera. If Llayl couldn’t physically be with Company 202, Parthavoh would share as much of their happenings as the censors allowed. Whenever he was off duty, he let the camera run. He told it everything they had seen and done so that Llayl could partake in the experience. In private, he recorded confessions and deleted them again. When the memory banks were full, he uploaded them in a packet and sent them winging across the galaxy.

It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t remotely satisfying. But sometimes, it was all the contact he had with Llayl for weeks on end. Their disparate schedules rarely aligned with access to a long-range holoterminal. Recorded messages were the best Parthavoh could do.

* * *

_“Hello, you. I can’t tell you where we are exactly or the censors will be after me, but here’s a clue: it’s very hot, and mold grows on anything that stands still too long. You get five minutes max, I swear. We have to hose the droids down with this spray that makes them turn pink, and then we have to hose them down again to clear their sensors. Have a guess? If so, send help. Seriously, this place is the pits.”_

* * *

Llayl was in little better shape financially. A Jedi Knight’s needs were met by their Order. Those needs were assumed not to go beyond food, clothes, travel, and lodging. They received a small stipend for incidentals. According to Llayl, some of his cohorts spent their credits on meaningful artifacts or gear. Those involved in research might save up for data crystals. Those working in Hutt Space needed bribe money.

Llayl sank it all into shipping costs.

The Jedi Knight was a man of his word, which was why he rarely gave it. This promise he kept: wherever he went, he sent Parthavoh samples of the local cuisine. Every month or so, Parthavoh got called to the post exchange to pick up a cryofreeze crate. (One memorable shipment came with the message _The sealant didn’t fail, it’s supposed to look like that._ “Are you sure?” Parthavoh asked, having waited to get Llayl on holo before trying it. “Because you haven’t seen it since—”)

He never said where the Jedi Council sent him, and Parthavoh never asked. The shipments came from all over the galaxy: Rishi, Dantooine, Ord Ibanna, Ilum. Parthavoh glued a flimsy of the galaxy to the lid of his footlocker and mapped Llayl’s route. The distance between them grew no shorter. They shared their meals weeks apart.

Once a whole case of Corellian brandy arrived, addressed to the entire company. The liquor was cold as ice and the color of credit chips. The Two-Oh-Two had a decadent night (and a brutal morning) and poured one out for their onetime padawan.

* * *

_“Eyyy, Jedi, Tuuq here! I’ve got a—no, Parth, I’m talking!—I’ve got a joke—It’s my fucking camera, boyo—You want me to take it back? Yeah, I thought so. —Why are droid mechanics never lonely?”_

* * *

The idea of Llayl going into—whatever the Jedi equivalent of special ops was—pissed Parthavoh off.

It wasn’t about the danger. He’d been in the army too long to waste much sleep over that, or to be distracted by the supposed honor. Once you joined up, you didn’t get a say in what happened next. Your commanders were going to use the people they had for the work they needed done, and no one was going to deploy Selkath to fucking Tatooine.

But there was a vast difference between an enlisted soldier like himself, and a Jedi, whose whole life was dictated by his Order. Jedi didn’t volunteer, they were born. They never chose. Any coloring outside the lines got them hunted down as a danger to the galaxy or something.

In retrospect, the Jedi Council’s haste about knighting Llayl made an uncomfortable amount of sense. All they wanted was another wind-up warrior to point at the Empire. Who cared about ideology? He wasn’t going be teaching the next generation. So what if his padawan years taught him nothing but the art of battle? They just needed the lightsaber in his jacked-up metal hands. The deaths of his masters left him free from obligations, and from anyone to take his part.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. War or no war. From what Parthavoh understood, most master-padawan pairs formed around a common purpose. Masters looked for someone like-minded to develop into a good partner. But the one master who actually chose Llayl didn’t get the chance. Whatever she meant him to do with his talents never came to pass. Someone cut short her life and Llayl’s arms and all the different people he might have become. Any training Llayl got after Zayer Ket’s death took place upon a battlefield.

Now he had no masters, no studies, not even any real hobbies. No special abilities for someone to argue against wasting. From the Jedi Council’s point of view, that was fine. It made things uncomplicated. If he died doing their dirty work, all they lost was a weapon. Not a mind. Not a heart. Not a person at all.

Parthavoh ran this by Sergeant W’noon once, who looked grim and changed the subject. He never mentioned it to Llayl, of course. You couldn’t ask someone outright how they felt about their suddenly reduced life expectancy.

Anyway, he was a little afraid of what Llayl would answer if he did.

That was the other problem with Jedi (and by that, he meant this one in particular.) The man just buckled down and did whatever was asked of him. Sometimes Parthavoh admired his complete lack of ego or ambition, but not in this. Did it even matter to him that his name had been put down for a roster of suicide missions? Llayl was nobody’s fool—most of the time—and after Master Nooibos, he surely knew better than to trust in the infallibility of his fellow Jedi, or even in their goodwill. But he had resigned himself to his entire existence before Parthavoh ever met him. He had only the one rebellion inside. He would never directly challenge the Council’s decisions.

Even when they seemed like seven different kinds of fucked up to an outside observer.

If love was a lifeline, then Parthavoh dug in his heels and held tight. He filled the memory banks of the borrowed camera with all the good, true things he could find. He recorded the best songs off the jukebox, the cacophony of languages in an interstellar market, Rajet’s promotion ceremony and the river rocks they heaped over his grave, Atana stitching a new lekku cover for Tuuq. Wherever Llayl was, whatever battles he fought, someone had to remind him that the galaxy was bigger and brighter than his duty to it.

And if Llayl would find it ironic that his ordinary corporal, without the slightest sensitivity to the Force, was arguing for the interconnectivity of the universe—well, that was another reason not to talk about it.

* * *

_“What you have just had the pleasure of listening to is a folk ballad in Dosh. We stopped to refuel in this little settlement down the canyon, but the generator for their trade depot had blown out, so we stayed to get it running again. Everything in the refrigeration tanks was going to go bad so they were just passing it out. It turned into a whole party with the lights from the convoy and all. This old Trandoshan was singing it. It’s supposed to be the story of this washed-up old warrior daring the punks who ganged up on him to try him alone, even though he’s not what he used to be, so that he dies right… I’m working on a full translation. I asked her to sing it again so I could get a good recording. I thought I was following along with the chorus okay but surprise, surprise, she said my accent’s terrible. Not enough gargle._

_Also, I miss you. Just sayin’.”_

* * *

The Jedi Knight rarely sent recordings. Glimpses of locations and data imprints gave away too much to unfriendly eyes. One time, though, he forwarded an official holovid from Coruscant’s Bureau of Tourism and Travel, which included a short clip of Llayl at the Jedi Temple, demonstrating lightsaber forms for a group of younglings. He wrote: _Fresh padawans coming soon to a frontline hellhole near you. I’ll cover combat training, you cover shotgunning beers._

Company 202 took over the mess hall after hours and put it up on the big projector there. They unlatched the seats from the tables to rearrange them in rings around it. Parthavoh sat between W’noon and Tuuq so that they could hold hands behind his back unobserved.

But the moment Llayl appeared in the vid, everyone else disappeared.

Five months had passed since Parthavoh had laid eyes on him, except as a scratchy blue holo. The high-quality recording brought him back to vibrant life. The amaranthine skies of Coruscant glossed his hair with rose and gold, and cast violet shadows under his jaw as he turned to correct someone.  

Parthavoh drank in the sight, forgotten glass growing warm in his hand. He had no ears for the voiceover, yammering about beacons of hope and so on. The camera swept across the younglings who mirrored his movements, but Parthavoh ignored them, seeking Llayl in every new angle. The tiny anonymous nicks and freckles that gave Llayl substance hypnotized him. The flash of teeth when he bit back a laugh. The tension of his long body shifting from form to form, a slow and deliberate dance with invisible enemies. The coiled strength in his neck and shoulders as he raised his arms, the hollow under his ribs where his tunic pulled tight. The bunching muscle in his thighs as he sank down to one knee. The bead of sweat that ran down his throat and under his collar.

When the clip ended, replaced by one about the grand library, W’noon turned and looked him over. She reclaimed her hand from Tuuq, uncapped her canteen, and dumped cold water on him. “Walk it off, Corporal!” she ordered while he sputtered. The others were sniggering.

* * *

_“Corporal, if you see this, don’t delete it. Just skip over it and send it with the rest. –Master Jedi, Parth let slip what you did for Tuuq. Don’t be angry with him. I just wanted to say thank you. And I wish you two the best of luck.”_

* * *

Llayl corresponded with other members of the company as well. When Parthavoh saw the symbol of the Jedi Order pop up in someone else’s mail files, he tried not to be jealous.

He knew Tuuq and Llayl traded messages frequently. She’d been in bad shape when the Mantheyon prisoners were exchanged. She spent a full month in the medbay of their troopship. It should have been longer, but when Company 202 was redeployed, she talked W’noon into signing her back into active duty rather than be left behind. But one of her lekku couldn’t be saved, and the Republic surgeons amputated it. Llayl knew something about that loss.

Tuuq didn’t let on how much the amputation pained her—literally or psychologically—until Parthavoh was summoned to the sergeant’s office.

The door opened to reveal W’noon’s bunk folded down from the wall and Tuuq stretched belly-down upon it in a damp undershirt, face hidden in her arms. Parthavoh stopped dead and fixed his eyes on nothing in particular. “Uh. Reporting for duty, Sergeant.”

“Come in, Corporal Parthavoh.” W’noon stood behind her desk, tapping on a datapad. “We were just concluding an argument.”

“Ma’am. I can come back at a more convenient time.”

“You think _you’re_ humiliated,” Tuuq said into her elbows.

W’noon’s jaw tensed. “I can’t just watch this,” she snapped at Tuuq. “Either as someone who cares about you, or as your C.O. who can’t afford to have her people blacking out in the middle of an engagement.”

“It won’t happen again. _Sergeant._ ”

W’noon let out a slow breath. More gently, she agreed, “I know it won’t.”

She edged around the desk and handed the datapad to Parthavoh. “Corporal, if you would.”

“What am I signing?”

“Your authorization for Specialist Sivada Tuuq to be evaluated for medical discharge.”

He looked from his sergeant to his comrade-in-arms lying prone. Tuuq’s fingers dug into her upper arms, and little tremors rattled through her body. He thought about the choices Llayl didn’t get to make. Softly, he said her name.

After a moment, Tuuq raised her head. She stared at the wall, her face tightly controlled even while tears of pain smeared across her cheeks. “Sign it,” she told him.

In silence he filled out the requisite forms, and scanned his thumbprint when prompted. W’noon reclaimed the datapad and typed a few more notes. Then, for a long time, she just gazed at the scarred, lopsided back of Tuuq’s head. At last, with heavy anger, she muttered, “Who the fuck leaves the shrapnel in? Corporal, hold here.”

When the door cycled shut behind the sergeant, Tuuq dropped her head back down into the shelter of her arms. She said something Parthavoh couldn’t make out. He went over to the folding bunk. Beside it stood W’noon’s desk chair, and a jug with a wet cloth draped over the lip. He put that together with Tuuq’s soaking collar and understood. He sat, picked up the cloth, and carefully blotted it against the ravaged stump of her lek. Tuuq shivered, but as he continued, the claw-like grip on her biceps relaxed.

“What is this stuff?” he asked after a little while.

“Salt water and kolto. Plus some things off the record. It helps.”

He bathed the wound as gently as he could. The only sounds were the soft hum of electronics and Tuuq’s halting inhalations.

“Tuuq, I didn’t think—”

Quickly she interrupted, squashing his sympathy. “So are we supposed to not know about you and Jedi Llayl, or…?”

“Ugh. Can we _pretend_ you don’t know?”

“Hey, I’m very good at keeping secrets.” He dapped at a raw place, and she hissed. “Just ask the Imperials.”

* * *

_“Hey. Um. It looks like I forgot to send this one. I guess I was still figuring out the camera, heh! Better late than never, right—”_

* * *

_“Hello, you. Hope you got offplanet okay. We are… six hours out, and I bet someone is just now realizing they left their toothbrush. Here, if I spin the camera you can see Mantheyon through the porthole.”_

_“Eyyy, Padawan!”_

_“Tuuq says hi. I’m already in deep shit for missing barracks breakdown, so I thought I might as well sneak into medbay, too. She’s pretty doped up but I wanted you to see that—”_

_“Parth. Parth. ‘S my turn. I want it.”_

_“Here you go.”_

_“Parth. My turn.”_

_“Yeah, I’m giving it to—Strap goes around your hand. Don’t drop it.”_

_“Won’t drop it.”_

_“There you go.”_

_“Uh-huh. You’re in the vid now too, yay… Say something nice.”_

_“Um. Like what?”_

_“What th’ hell, you’re so embarrassing… Padawan. Padawan. You there?”_

_“He’s there, Tuuq. Sort of. Eventually.”_

_“Okay. Padawan. I want to say… and I’m being very serious right now, I’m very serious… I’m pissed you didn’t come aboard and say goodbye. Just say goodbye. Seriously. That sucks.”_

_“She’s actually really mad.”_

_“I am so mad.”_

_“Somehow, despite the shit-ton of painkillers, she’s glaring. She punched me when I said you were shipping out separately.”_

_“I am telling myself… because I’m a damned nice person… that you didn’t because you knew... if you got on… we’d stuff you in a footlocker and bring you with.”_

_“Yeah, not gonna lie. That would have happened.”_

_“So you’re a shithead, Padawan… but the point is that we’re gonna miss you. Okay? We love you.”_

_“Love you, Llayl.”_

* * *

The day that Tuuq went in for her medical evaluation, Parthavoh found a package on his bunk. In the finest black-market tradition, all identifiers had been removed. in the finest black-market tradition. Inside lay a refurbished long-range personal comm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The answer to Tuuq’s joke about droid mechanics, in case you’ve never heard it, is “because they’re always making new friends.”


	4. Llayl: Coruscant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A contrasting interlude from the Jedi Knight's perspective.

The city is a world and the world is a city. When the city burns, the world screams. The scream rises from the molten core of rock and erupts from two billion mortal throats.

Within it, Llayl stands in a private stillness. It is not an oasis in the desert. It is the barren heath where nothing grows. A nearby explosion hollowed out a sphere of silence around him. Blood leaks warm from his ears.

_You are a rock,_ his first master told him. _You are a stone cast into the river. Whether the water of life flows calm and clear around you, whether the current tears you from your resting place, whether you are slowly ground down or shattered apart in the tumult—at every moment, your substance is the same. The fact of you is immutable._

He is a rock, despite the chaos, despite the agony.

He is a rock, and all around him churns the flood of war.

From a rooftop terrace, he bears witness to the bombardment of the senate district. Skytowers claw at the clouds before toppling. Coruscant’s upper atmosphere is filled with Imperial warships, the lower with smoke and chemical fires. Below that, the undercity is hell. Pieces of buildings and droids and living beings fall like hail.

The flames consuming the great Jedi Temple seem to singe his face, even at this distance. The psychic devastation is a heat unlike other flames.

He is alone in the silence, but this terrace is crowded with other survivors. Marooned strangers huddle together, clutching unfamiliar hands. Tears wash clean trails on their bloody, ash-covered faces. Like him, they climbed to high ground and clear air. Like him, they watched orbital barrages level whole neighborhoods and blow apart the glittering swarm of traffic that clotted Coruscant’s airways. The defense grid is gone and the satellites offline. There is no rescue coming.

Their cries do not breach the silence. Their terror does. Their needs batter at him with bruising force. _Help us._ They believe a Jedi Knight can protect them. As though a single warrior could counter a blast from a star destroyer’s cannons, or deflect the plummeting mass of a burning ship.

He can’t protect them. He can’t even escort them to safety. This crowded, vertical city offers no shelter. When the front line encompasses an entire planet, there is nowhere to retreat. The deaths awaiting them are impersonal: strafed from above, or asphyxiated or crushed in the lower levels. Either way, this building will bury them.

He does not burden them with his own powerlessness.

What he can do, and does, is hold their despair at bay. His touch upon sentient minds is heavy rather than deft, and so he seldom employs it. Today it does not matter. All he has to do is hood the frantic fluttering bird of their fear.

When their panic makes him lightheaded, he pushes back peace with all his strength. He numbs their grief with detachment. He mutes their terror with incuriosity. He blankets their fever to survive, as though it were a sick animal, and wills it to stop breathing.

He cannot make them hopeful. One cannot give what one does not possess. Instead he tells them, in the unprotected dark of their minds, _Be rocks and sink with me. Be not swept away in the torrent of despair. Be here with me, until we are not._ He places his hand on shaking shoulders and says aloud, although he cannot hear his own words, _Be at peace. The Force is with us._

It is not a lie. It is all around them, screaming. But not a single person has jumped from this terrace in despair.

He is a rock, and he builds a wall of rock thoughts around them.

The skytower beneath them trembles as a neighboring building buckles. He measures the perimeter of the terrace with his step, circling his fellow castaways like a shepherd with his flock. When he senses a focusing of attention upon their precarious outpost, he levels his lightsaber as though he could duel death for them. It hums in his hand with citrine light, cutting through the ashy haze.

What veers through the onslaught is only a local freight hauler. It circles the terrace once before closing in. He pivots on his heel to watch, lowering the weapon. A surge of emotion spills through his mental walls as the others hope for evacuation.

The freighter crunches against the terrace railing and bounces back. It scrapes along for several feet as the pilot fights the smoky updraft. Llayl leaps forward with others to steady it. But those who reach up to be rescued collide with those scrambling down onto the questionable safety of solid ground. The bed of the freighter is full of dazed and injured survivors.

The strongest among them hand down the weaker ones. Llayl holds up his arms to take a sagging Gand from two of its coworkers. It is limp, barely conscious. Its bank uniform is dark and wet. The other tellers slide down to follow him. Their eyes are glassy and wild. The Gand’s head lolls against his shoulder.

His Code declares: there is no death. There is the Force.

That is the paradox Llayl knows best. He learned it at Zayer Ket’s side, with copper in his mouth and salt water in his eyes.

The presence and power within him are demonstrable; the fact of death is inescapable. To doubt the one is to doubt himself. To deny the other is to reject the one experience shared by every being in the universe.

He carries the dying teller across the terrace to a little arbor, where the other injured lie. He braces it between arm and knee, shrugs off his outer robe, and wraps it gently before laying it down. One of its coworkers curls up beside it, putting her arms around its neck. The difference between their conditions is not immediately obvious. The smoky light gives them both an ugly pallor.

If he allowed himself, he would envy the Gand this moment. It is better, if one must die—and one must, always—to not die alone.

The essential fact of the matter does not change. One might die weeping, or bleeding, or drifting away as the lungs weaken and breath grows thin. One might die in a single, painless flash of light. One is no less alive before, and in the next moment, no less dead. Any notion of a gradient elides the matter. He learned that from his master as well.

Llayl has not died yet. He does not know whether a compassionate touch relieves one iota of pain. But he has looked into the eyes of the dying and seen anguish defanged, if not banished, by the knowledge that one is not abandoned.

He lays one hand on the Gand’s head and the other over the laced fingers of its friend, briefly sharing in their communion.

When he opens his eyes, the third teller is staring at him in wonder. He feels their anxiety diminish like a fire with dirt kicked over its coals. It would be cruel, and pointless, to declare that he has no healing skill. _Stay with them_ , he says—he does not know how loudly—and gives that one his canteen. They take it as though it is filled with miracles.

If he had had different masters, different training _—_

He lets the thought flow past him and disappear in the torrent. What can’t be undone is less important than what can still happen.

A middle-aged woman shuffles through the crowd, taking pictures. She is not recording the scene like a journalist would, only the faces of those around her. Her mouth moves and she gestures at the sky, the silenced satellites. Her pictures will say, this person was here, this person, this person.

Llayl looks at her grey, determined face. Another thousand die every hour, unmarked graves spreading across the city like mushrooms. Her efforts are futile, and magnificent.

When she comes around to him, Llayl smiles. Let that be recorded.

For a moment, surprised, she smiles back.

A hand on his arm turns him toward a tourist in gaudy clothes. She has wrapped her shirt around the lower half of her face to block the smoke; Llayl sees her jaw move when she speaks. He shakes his head, touching a bloody ear. _I can’t hear you_ , he explains.

The woman’s brow furrows. She pulls him back to the edge of the terrace, where the rail is buckling beneath the freighter’s weight. She has a brief exchange with a man still aboard. He sizes the Jedi Knight up with a flick of his eyes. The woman points to the lightsaber clipped to his belt, then back the way the freighter came. The man extends a hand to pull Llayl up.

To stay here and wait for death to stumble across him, or to go and throw himself in his path?

He goes.

The tourist heaves herself aboard behind him. The pilot wrenches the freighter free of the crumpled rail. They drop sharply before the engines catch and hurl them forward, into the beleaguered city.

Llayl does not ask where they are going, or what good they hope to achieve. It is enough that someone said, _come and help us._ He permits himself no curiosity. He has set aside everything but this moment and this place. How the Empire orchestrated an assault on the Republic capital itself, whether any warning escaped before Coruscant’s satellites shut down, what other planets are under attack: these questions are not important now. To dwell on them is to let in fear, and with it regret—longing—bitterness—anger. He must not wonder. The only world that matters is the one he can affect.

A handful of others have also chosen to risk whatever hell it was that the freight hauler escaped, its belly full of refugees. They are a motley group, but Llayl assesses them like troops. He notes their condition, who looks to which other for support, whose hands tremble and who grips a weapon with purpose. The woman with the shirt over her face and her companion are dressed like tourists but move like soldiers. They trade hand signs he knows. The one passing around a flask displays a street gang’s emblem on her vest. The others could be ticket sellers, cleaning crew, engineers, off-duty diplomatic aides. Llayl places himself where they will be most vulnerable, strengthening their line.

Parthavoh is among them. Not in the flesh, of course, but he is there nevertheless. Today Llayl hears with the Force and he sees with his heart, and Parthavoh is everywhere.

His hands helped steady the freighter with its desperate cargo. He shouldered the weight of a dying comrade beside the bank tellers. He is one of the soldiers, vacation cut short, walking all but naked into battle. He is the pilot hunched over her controls and the bloodstained jacket knotted around her belly, who flies her lumbering freighter through a bombardment so that a few, perhaps, will survive.

Of this Llayl has no doubt. The man he loves would throw himself into this cataclysm without hesitation.

It is less a matter of courage than of great willingness. That was the lesson Llayl took from Company 202. If Parthavoh were here, he would not be daunted by the slim odds of survival. He would throw rocks at a battleship. He would curse the falling debris, and laugh at any blast that failed to kill him, and in the midst of death consider it good to be alive just a minute longer.

Llayl is not so sanguine. There is nothing good in this. Today a planet burns and thousands of its people. Perhaps a government falls, and with it, democratic freedom for trillions around the galaxy. He is willing, soldier-like, to go where duty calls, but he goes without hope. Where Parthavoh would see a chance, Llayl sees only somber inevitability.

But today he sees Parthavoh as well, and he follows him.

He goes where his lover would go, and so in this way they are not apart.

The freighter flies low as it passes near the spaceport. The gap on the horizon where the Jedi Temple stood draws the eye, like a missing tooth in the city’s jaw. The glow of its fires paints the clouds from below. The others look from it to Llayl, but he doesn’t think anyone speaks to him. They have a common purpose and a common grief. His is just the most widely recognizable. They wouldn’t know over which charred tenement to console their other comrades.

He grips the lightsaber in his left hand. His right is tucked inside the collar of his tunic, palm pressed flat above his heart and fingers at the join where flesh yields to metal. His fingertips register only pressure. But the soft skin at the top of his arm feels the cold.

He would have reported to the Jedi Temple this morning, if he had not delayed to take a call from Parthavoh.

The impulse is strong to think that he is alive now because love spared him. Llayl resists it. From there, one could slip into believing being in love made one more _worthy_ of being alive. More deserving. But the dead also loved and were loved.

Let conclusions hold their tongues. Love will not disarm the weapons, or stop the bombs from falling. Love is neither a protecting power nor a saving grace.

It is _a_ grace nevertheless. What it offers is not the right to survive. It is the eye of his heart that sees Parthavoh wherever he looks, erasing the distance between them. It is the certainty, within this isolating silence, that the last words he spoke to his lover were warm and true. Even if his body is lost in the rubble of Coruscant, he will survive in memory on the Outer Rim.

There is no death.

The freight hauler rumbles through the sky. Disaster rains around them. The smoke grows thick, blotting the ruined temple from sight.

It is another loss, another piece chipped off of his life. Llayl lets it go. He is a rock worn smooth by the flood. Anything that could catch and hold him is ground away.

But within him is a secret hollow place where love grows crystalline.


	5. All In

 

Company 202 was suiting up and running final equipment checks when Parthavoh’s comm chirped. Personal channel. He tapped to mute his radio uplink and routed the call to his helmet. “This is Sergeant Parthavoh.”

“First, congratulations on the promotion.”

“Llayl!”

He was glad the helmet obscured the sudden grin on his face. He rocked out of the queue, signaling for the others to precede him through the hatch. “Hey, I can’t talk, we’re about to drop—”

“You’ve got good weather for it.”

“How do you—” He took his eyes from the lemon-colored landscape of Tvanuk 4, whirring past the open hatch of the transport, to check the call data scrolling across the bottom of his helmet display. “You’re in-system!”

“And they said you were just a pretty face.”

“Oh, you sneaky son of a... What are you—Shit, I can’t—Why didn’t you tell me—”

“Last-minute intel from unnamed sources. The Jedi Council has an interest in your pirate situation.”

“Your kind of trouble?”

“Could be. We’ve got authorization to commandeer a few dozen of the Republic’s finest to help us find out.”

“Do you take volunteers?”

“Applications will be considered on an individual basis. I’ll be planetside the day after tomorrow. How do you want to celebrate your promotion?”

“Privately.”

“An excellent plan. Come back in one piece.” He terminated the call.

* * *

 

Forty-one hours later, Parthavoh was flat on his back in the medbay, and Llayl stood at the foot of his cot saying, “Technically, I suppose you did follow orders.”

“Come a little closer so I can show you just how _fucking funny_ you are.”

His voice came out clotted and thick. The surgeon had a hell of a time putting his nose back in place, or so his fellow troops assured him. He knew that the tubes they’d shoved up the reconstructed nasal passages draped across his lips, because they tugged oddly when he talked, but he couldn’t feel them otherwise. He was numb from eyelid to chin. Upwards of that, he was working on a thundering headache.

Despite all of that, he couldn’t quit grinning. He watched the Jedi closely, in case his words slurred too much for comprehension, but he didn’t need that excuse to feast his eyes on Llayl’s face. Here with him at last. Solid and real and true.

Llayl, he couldn’t help but notice, didn’t look back very often. Instead, he surveyed the medbay, as though it weren’t identical to any other they’d known—just one more BV-class reinforced longhouse, five cots and a multifunction terminal-and-droid pairing. He perused the medical charts. He scanned the classic poster reminding service members to schedule regular checkups with their sexual partners.

His uncharacteristic evasion confirmed Parthavoh’s suspicion that he looked a damn wreck.

Well. Take a header off a cargo crawler, and you counted yourself lucky if you didn’t go under the treads. He was just glad Tvanuk 4’s pirates weren’t actively dropping bombs on their heads right then, and someone made the time to pick him out of the mud.

The war did not end with the sacking of Coruscant. It only changed shape. Republic and Imperial forces stayed at arm’s length now, snarling at each other across demarcations drawn up by the new treaty. They puppeteered proxy spats while declaring their innocence. The galaxy, carved up like a roast between them, rested uneasily. How long the façade would last was anyone’s guess. No longer than it took for each side to lick their wounds and regather their strength.

The soap-bubble peace made Parthavoh uneasy. He preferred an open battlefield, a clear enemy. But stomping pirates and rebuilding infrastructure within the war-ravaged territories meant fewer coffins being shipped out. Meanwhile, Llayl’s missions for the Jedi Council were both shorter and more far-flung, countering clandestine Sith operations wherever they popped up.

After more than a year, fate landed them on the same planet at the same time.

And Parthavoh was in fucking _traction._ Because of a stray cable.

“And here you were telling me that you got in less trouble with Tuuq being on ice,” Llayl was saying, scrolling through the readouts displayed at the foot of the cot. Parthavoh squinted, but the projected text was backwards from his viewpoint. “Two cracked ribs, right wrist, right tibia _and_ fibula, three toes on the left… How did that happen?”

“Medevac. They shut the hatch on my foot.”

“That’ll do it. Plus the nose, the teeth…” Llayl read a little further. His fingers tightened around the cot frame. “Assorted sprains and contusions… not worth reciting.” He switched the display off and bowed over it. Briefly, he actually looked at Parthavoh. “It’s good to see you.”

“Now say it like you mean it,” Parthavoh teased, and earned a washed-out chuckle for his efforts.

An alert chimed somewhere in the cobweb of tubes and wires that surrounded him. The med droid detached from its terminal and whirred over. Llayl stood back to let it access the display. He shot Parthavoh a guilty grimace, which made him snort, which in turn meant that the droid wanted to fiddle with the tubes in his nose. He screwed up his eyes and endured.

“I talked to W’noon on the way in,” Llayl said. “She’s giving Corporal Kleveodi temporary command of your squad.”

“I know. She was up here earlier. Ow!”

“ _The patient will please remain still.”_

“I didn’t get the impression you were lucid then.”

“Comes and goes.” He raised a finger on his good hand: _wait_. He glowered at the droid until it finished its adjustments and returned to its post. Then he told Llayl, “There’s a stim under the splint.”

Llayl followed his glance to the sprained wrist, shaking his head wryly. “W’noon’s going to take those sergeant’s bars right back.”

“Who do you think hooked me up?” Parthavoh explored his reglued front teeth with his tongue. Shit, was one crooked? He couldn’t tell. His tongue felt fat as a ball of socks. “Atana’s supposed to pop in before the surgeon does his rounds… remove the evidence.”

Llayl sighed. He picked up a juicebox that someone had left for Parthavoh and popped in the straw. “You’re probably going to develop a heart condition from this. Besides, the point of being drugged to the gills is so that you’re not conscious enough to hurt. To reduce the strain on your body.”

“Yeah, the medevac team said. —That’s not a bad gig, you know,” Parthavoh added. “Hell of a lot easier teaching a soldier how to handle a K-X12 and an emergency kit than it is to drop a doctor into a combat situation. Army covers tuition, too.”

“Is that what Tuuq’s doing when her discharge is finalized?”

“She’s not sure yet. I might, though.”

“You won’t get discharged over this. Maybe if they’d taken off your whole leg with the hatch.”

“Then I’d get a shiny new one. We’d match.”

“Make up a whole person out of spare parts between you and me.”  But Llayl’s disapproval showed through the banter, and his smile was weary.

Parthavoh thought about reminding him that this was neither the first nor the last time a soldier had bucked a doctor’s orders. Sometimes you needed to cut the pain to focus, but couldn’t afford the slowdown effect of the standard painkillers. If you didn’t have mystic Jedi bullshit to recharge your batteries, the right stims boosted your adrenaline long enough to finish a mission or get out of whatever trouble you were in. The crash was hard and the aftermath wretched. Parthavoh thought it was worth the cost. Some chances you didn’t get back once they were gone.

“Look, Llayl, I told W’noon I wanted to be up when you got here. I’ll rest while you’re out kicking our local hornet nest.”

“How much does it hurt?”

He flapped his fingers. “Don’t worry about it. It looks worse than it is.”

That was a shot in the dark. He had no idea how bad it looked (W’noon had refused him a mirror) and it felt pretty bad. He could almost convince himself it was like a really bad hangover after a bar fight—the kind where he was still somewhat drunk and mostly wanted to lie still and ache, but also to throw up a little. Not too much worse than that. As long as he breathed shallowly, and didn’t move much.

The second half of that was easy to do. Either the stim wasn’t very strong or else whatever they’d dosed him with to get at the breaks and sprains really packed a punch. Parthavoh’s head was mostly clear, headache aside, but his muscles were a slithering pile of goop. It left him with the bizarre sensation of having somehow come unplugged from his own body. He kept checking whether he was still all there from the ribs down. Just lifting his head off the pillow took concentration and effort.

He understood why you weren’t supposed to be conscious for this part. Absolutely. He also absolutely did not regret it.

He shut his eyes for a few minutes. Finally he cracked one open to peer at Llayl. “Hey. Why are you all the way over there?”

Llayl went still, juicebox halfway to his mouth. After a moment, he answered, “Given that you're essentially immobilized, I assumed our private celebration would have to be postponed.”

“That’s not—I didn’t mean that.” Which wasn’t a lie. But in the back of his mind, a wistful little fantasy sprang into being. Different than he’d imagined before, passion giving way to tenderness, Llayl gentle with his bruises… He squashed the idea almost at once. “Just have a seat. There's a stool.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I like you complicated. Try me.”

Llayl sighed again. “Well, then, I’m thinking how little serenity actually means until it is put to the test.”

“Okay. Go on, Master Serenity. What’s the test?”

“You, my friend.”

Parthavoh glanced down the length of his body: splinted, bandaged, numbed, and intubated. “I can’t help being irresistible.”

“You look like shit,” Llayl said bluntly. But before Parthavoh could take offense—real or feigned—his voice softened. He glanced at the droid as he spoke. “It's easier when you're far away. All I want to do now is put my arms around you and forget the mission.”

“So why don’t you?”

“You wouldn’t either.”

“Don’t be so sure of that.”

Llayl nodded, more to himself than to Parthavoh. “That’s the problem.” He recalled the juice, still suspended in midair. He took a sip and stared into it, his smile a thin line of some inward joke. “It’s easier far away,” he repeated.

“Some things are harder.” Parthavoh paused. “Take that how you want.” Another pause, longer. “Dammit, I wish I’d planned that. That was pretty smooth.” That got a flash of teeth out of Llayl, but not enough to chivvy him free of whatever black thought had him.

Well, there were other solutions.

Parthavoh cast around, straining to raise his head. “Hey, did they take my comm?”

“It’s on the tray.”

That was on his right, the bad side. Parthavoh tried to reach it, but he didn’t try too hard. Even his good hand seemed to weigh about fifty pounds. “Be a buddy and pass it to me.”

Llayl came over long enough to do exactly that before retreating to the far side of the medbay. Parthavoh glared at him. Llayl just arched an eyebrow in reply and leaned against the wall like he’d been tacked there before the poster. “Love you too, asshole,” Parthavoh muttered.

With effort, he got the comm situated on his collarbone, above the cracked ribs. If he tucked his chin he could mostly see the screen. Tediously he tapped out a message. At last, he hit ‘send’ and slumped back with relief. He heard the comm bounce off the cot and clatter onto the floor. “I’m not getting that,” he announced to the ceiling.

“Care to explain?”

He closed his eyes again. “I’m making things easy for you. Here, the insystem lag isn’t too—” Across the room, Llayl’s comm chirped. “There you go.”

Parthavoh waited while Llayl read the message. He’d gotten used to waiting.

Finally, the percussive unsound of a comm switching off pulled him back to alert. As he opened his eyes, Llayl spoke.

“If you had landed a little differently, you would have broken your neck.”

Parthavoh shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I didn’t. Plus, I thought Jedi weren’t supposed to dwell on stuff like that.”

“Yes. This is why.”

“Look, you survived Coruscant. I survived this. Happy accidents. I’ll be good as new by the time you get back.” He hoped.

“I don’t know if we’ll return to this station after the mission. It depends.” Llayl gestured vaguely, juicebox in one hand, comm in the other. “If we confirm a Sith presence behind these pirates…”

“Right. I get that. What I don’t get is why you can’t sit the fuck next to me for a few minutes instead of making me strain my neck on top of everything else.” Llayl stayed where he was. “Seriously, what are you scared is gonna happen if we get within five feet of each other? Given the circumstances, your reputation is not exactly in danger. Or your virtue or whatever.”

“Parthavoh,” Llayl said in an odd tone, “how long would it have taken you to know if I’d been killed on Coruscant?”

“Um. Llayl, I really don’t—”

“Are we talking days? Weeks? Maybe months, just to be sure.”

“It didn’t happen, Llayl.”

“If you die, I will know.” Llayl set the juicebox down and folded his arms tightly. “I was in orbit, right here, and you almost—I followed you, you know. On Coruscant.”

“Wait, what?” Parthavoh blinked at the ceiling. He was pretty sure it wasn’t the kolto cocktail that had him confused.

“When I first told you I loved you, it wasn’t really _about_ you. That's not to hurt you. Please just listen.” Parthavoh, all ears and growing alarm, nodded faintly. “The considerations I had to make, to come to terms with, to choose to— _You_ weren’t my decision. It was between me and my heart.”

“Um. I’m not following you here.”

“Here,” Llayl echoed. “Where we are again. After all this time. And it’s… complicated.”

For the third time, speaking lowly, he repeated: “It was easy when you were farther away. I warned you about this, but we both knew I couldn’t, physically _couldn't_ be there if you needed me. It was never even in question. But when I said it, I didn’t know how hard—” He inhaled sharply. “Now that I’m here, seeing you like this… I might not be able to leave your side again. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

All the jumbled statements turning over in Parthavoh’s mind fell into place.

He looked at the Jedi standing there alone, with his arms wrapped around himself like armor, and something inside him the surgeon couldn’t reach cracked.

The way Llayl framed things, as though he had a responsibility to Parthavoh that wasn’t returned in kind—he could argue with that. He could point out that this was nothing new, that they’d had their necks under the axe every day since they first met. Or—hell—wasn’t this why Llayl had spoken up about his feelings in the first place? Maybe he’d been on solo ops for too long. Risked his own life every day, but lost the knack of facing the horrible fragility of other people.

Another Jedi would probably talk Llayl through his concerns rationally like that.

But Parthavoh wasn’t one.

“That’s bullshit,” he said roughly. “You’re going to tell that kind of thinking to fuck right off.”

“Am I?” Llayl smiled. His eyes were those of a man facing a firing squad.

“Did you forget I know you? Listen to yourself, Llayl. You're not going to let fear yank you around. You've never taken the easy road before and you're not going to start today. And you're definitely not going to do it in front of the guy who thinks you hung the damn moon.”

The Jedi’s laugh was more than a little strained. “Should I ask you to specify which moon and in which sky?”

“Any of them. All of them.” He rolled his eyes, dismissing the lot.

“‘Tell fear to fuck off…’” Llayl unfolded one arm to pinch the bridge of his nose. He mused, “I'm really looking forward to being a part of the company again. Even for a little while.”

“We save a seat in every mess for you.”

“I know you do.”

Parthavoh lifted his good arm and crooked a finger. “C’mere, you.” Llayl still didn’t stir. “Come on, come over here. I’ll kick you out when it’s time. Don’t make it complicated, alright? It doesn’t have to be. The fate of the galaxy doesn’t depend on it. Just. Please.”

If his voice wavered on the last, he could blame it on the physical pain.

Maybe precognitive powers were contagious. Parthavoh knew the moment Llayl made up his mind, even before he started walking. It was something in his shoulders—the subtlest shift down and back at once, both defeated and steeled.

Why did his stomach knot up at Llayl’s approach? Some instinctive, animal dread of being belly-up and helpless before another? But the dread was half thrill.

Llayl came to the right side of the cot. He hooked the stool aside and sank down on his knees. The weight of his elbows on the edge of the mattress gave it a slight tilt, like a gravity well pulling Parthavoh subtly but inexorably into his orbit. But the web of buckles, restraints, feeds, and tubes held Parthavoh in place, and Llayl hunched over his crossed arms and did not touch him.

He knew it, too. That was clear in the way he gazed down, not at Parthavoh, but at the two inches of creased mattress lying like a minefield between his arms and Parthavoh’s splinted wrist.

Well, love’s a compromise, Parthavoh was thinking, at the exact moment that Llayl raised his head and whispered, “Meet me halfway.”

Parthavoh bit his lip and focused all his jellified strength to lift his left arm. Carefully, deliberately, he reached across and laid his hand on his lover’s cheek.

His chest felt tight. He heard Llayl suck in his breath.

It was like looking at someone in a flickering light, but it wasn’t vision that came and went, but the sense of touch. Between the raw stinging flesh of his scraped palm and the bandages, the warmth of Llayl’s skin was there and gone, there and gone. Parthavoh curled his stiff fingers to touch the corner of Llayl's brow, the studs climbing the lobe of his ear. He touched his thumb to the tip of his nose.

Llayl, here. Llayl, real. Llayl leaning, slow but eager, into his touch. His lip curved against the base of Parthavoh’s thumb. Behind it, the sharp point of his eyetooth.

Parthavoh stroked his face with a shaking hand. Never before had he touched Llayl like this, with intent and awareness. His skin prickled. Sorrow and want and wonder curled in his gut. He held his breath and watched Llayl’s eyes shut, his brow furrow. His lashes were black against his pear-pale cheek. Parthavoh ran his hand down the plane of his jaw, cupped Llayl’s throat and the astonishingly soft skin under his ear, felt his pulse throb under his palm. It seemed miraculous.

When he slid his hand up the back of Llayl’s neck, finding all the knobs and hollows of his spine, Llayl bent like a blade of grass. He curled inward, inward, over his crossed arms and planted elbows. His forehead landed on Parthavoh’s ribs.

 _That_ hurt. He grunted involuntarily.

Immediately Llayl reared back. Parthavoh clamped desperately on his nape, forcing “it’s fine!” through gritted teeth. After a moment, Llayl settled again, gingerly laying his head a little higher, on the better-padded and less-bruised socket of his shoulder, with Parthavoh’s splinted wrist pinned awkwardly between them.

Then Llayl breathed out, and Parthavoh did too, and they were alright. They were fine. They were together.

Bits of Llayl’s hair drifted across Parthavoh’s neck and tickled his face. He tried not to sneeze. Sneezing would hurt. Who knew where the tubes in his nose would end up if that happened? He breathed shallowly, trusting that if the Jedi sensed the tension of pain in his body, he would also sense Parthavoh’s determination to ignore it.

Don’t talk, he willed them both, stroking Llayl’s hair. The feel of it fascinated him. Few of his previous partners came from hair-growing species—his usual type veered farther from Human than Llayl did—and the experience was a novelty. He liked the sensation of running his fingers up through the short bristle to the tattoo behind his left ear, then combing back through the long tangle on the right. With each pass, Llayl relaxed a little more, his head growing heavier on Parthavoh’s shoulder. The rise and fall of his breathing matched the slow glide of Parthavoh’s hand over his scalp. Parthavoh wasn’t sure which one of them made the adjustment.

After a few minutes, Llayl started to chuckle. Not hard, not loud, but whatever had him by the funny bone didn’t let go. “What now?” Parthavoh mumbled. Then he glanced past Llayl’s head and realized. “Oh. Oh, fuck everything. That’s—Can you please—”

Llayl was already reaching for the thin blanket folded at the foot of the neighboring cot. He let it fall in an artful rumple across Parthavoh’s hips. The effect wasn’t as subtle as Parthavoh hoped.

“Here, I’ll get a pillow.”

“And smother me with it, will you?” Parthavoh let his head fall back. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Parthavoh?”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Parth—”

“I can’t even feel it, it’s all numb, some side effect of the stim—”

“Sergeant Parthavoh. Shut up.” Llayl put his fingers over Parthavoh’s mouth. “I can take a compliment.”

They had talked about sex, of course. Not as much as their ruder comrades implied. Having the long-range personal comm opened up certain topics for discussion, but Llayl pulled the plug on that one after establishing monogamous intent and a _yes, please_ view of the future. “Feel free to go into detail,” Parthavoh had suggested, already compiling an extensive list of things he wanted to do to, for, and with Llayl.

“I like looking forward to being surprised. More to the point, I don’t want to die of frustration.” Llayl had held up his hands before the holotransmitter, splayed his fingers. Metal glinted. “Let me just say: _very uncomfortable,_ ” he enunciated, as Parthavoh winced. “In my situation, discretion is the better part of ardour.”

The market catering to long-distance situations like theirs existed. (Tuuq, deskbound and bored while her medical discharge was debated by the higher-ups, helpfully forwarded advertisements.) Personally, Parthavoh had no interest in substitutions. So their conversations as long-distance lovers mostly sounded like their conversations as brothers-in-arms. They kept to safe subjects until the day something changed in their logistical situation.

And that day had not yet arrived. He knew that, even if his stim-spiked body and overwhelmed senses didn’t.

Still, for all that Parthavoh was now envisioning the stages of rakghoul plague in gruesome detail, trying to counteract his humiliatingly ill-timed arousal, he had half a thought of catching those hushing fingers between his teeth, applying his tongue to Llayl’s fingertips, and seeing if he could pass on the embarrassment. Hell. How sensitive were those prosthetics, anyway?

As if catching his thought, Llayl took his hand back. He gently replaced a nasal tube that had gotten disarranged. The bizarre tugging sensation popped Parthavoh’s little reverie. He sighed.

“If you’ve ever wondered how much I miss you, there’s your answer.”

“I had an idea already.” Llayl looked downright smug. Fucking Jedi and their fucking self-control. “I just didn’t realize you felt that strongly about my haircut.”

“When you get back, maybe we can figure out how I feel about the rest of you.”

Immediately the self-amused smile went sideways. “Don’t wait up.”

“Hardly. I’ll be out like a light when the stim wears off. A model patient.” He raised a hand in solemn pledge. “I’ve waited a long time, you know. I can wait a little longer.”

“It could be a very long wait. I can’t promise I’ll be coming back through here.”

“Just hitch a ride with the Two-Oh-Two.”

“It’s not my decision, Parthavoh. Not my ship, either. The Council sent four of us to look into the Tvanuk pirates. I can’t just go wheeling off on my own, especially if we do flush out the Sith they think you’ve got here.”

“And if you don’t?”

“My friend—”

“Look, all I’m saying is you’ve got a little more flexibility in your situation than I do. You can actually talk to the other decision makers and say hey, let’s take a few days to regroup, gather intel…”

“I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“I mean, hell, are you going to try, or are you just going to sit there and see if destiny shakes out in your favor?”

He expected Llayl to snap back with something cutting and tender, as he usually did. Instead, he seemed to go very far away for a moment. Parthavoh could almost feel the absence of him, gone still as an empty house. “That’s not how I think,” he said, and Parthavoh knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was lying.

Some strangled noise escaped him. He had to scramble for an excuse. He flagged the med droid over, muttering, “Ribs,” as he avoided Llayl’s eyes. It performed another scan, pointedly placing his left arm flat on the cot. Thankfully, it paid no attention to the situation south of the blanket. Maybe the cold shock caused the problem to subside. He couldn’t tell from his current vantage point and there was no polite way to ask.

They waited out the droid’s ministrations in quiet. Llayl got up and retrieved the juicebox from the other side of the medbay. He offered Parthavoh a sip, saying, with valiant humor, “It’s better than we got on Mantheyon.”

The droid confiscated it. “ _The patient will please refrain from ingesting substances for six hours and forty-one minutes.”_

“That’ll teach you to dive off of cargo crawlers.”

“Dammit, and I had so much fun on the way down.”

Idle banter like that, buying time, until the droid capped off a fresh blood sample and returned to its terminal for analysis.

What it would make of his heightened adrenaline, he neither knew nor cared, because as soon as it left, Llayl took Parthavoh’s good hand in both of his. He stood regarding the contrast meditatively. Probably wondering what he was doing fooling around (or not fooling around) with this busted-up idiot when there was a galaxy to run.

Parthavoh marshalled his thoughts. He’d spoken only out of exasperation, not believing it. Now he didn’t know. Had Llayl spent this past year trying? Had he taken every opportunity to get to where Parthavoh could get to _him_ , and been thwarted every time? Or had Llayl preferred making peace with their bad situation over changing it?

He was afraid of what Llayl would say if confronted head-on. The distance, the infrequent calls and interstellar shipments, the fact that Parthavoh had survived for more than a year on the memory of a single startling kiss—he could endure all that, if he knew it was the best they could have. But if Llayl admitted they could have had better, that thing which had cracked inside of him might splinter beyond repair.

Llayl was murmuring “I always wanted to do this” as though to himself, measuring the length of Parthavoh’s fingers against his own. Parthavoh watched him, and thought, and went for it.

“Llayl, are you all in?”

Llayl looked up from his study of Parthavoh’s palm. He’d come back from whatever inward place he went. His smile was unguarded. “Sorry, say again?”

“I’m all in. Are you?”

But he saw that Llayl didn’t understand. He couldn’t throw the accusation at him like a grenade. He shook his head.

“Look, I’m going to tell you something, and I just want you to think about it.” Llayl nodded, taking a knee beside the cot again. “I can’t leave my post. If Republic High Command sends the Two-Oh-Two somewhere, that’s where I’ll be.” He saw Llayl open his mouth, brow furrowing, and cut him off. “Thing is, though, I’ve been saving up a lot of leave, and with this promotion, the accrual rate kicks up a notch.  I have a good line of credit now and an _assload_ of favors I can call in with the other NCOs. The second you tell me you’re in the neighborhood, I’m there, Llayl. Through anything short of an active mission, I’ll find a way to you.”

He worked his hand out of Llayl’s tensed grip and reached up to brush his face with the knuckles. He kept his fingers curled in, out of the way of temptation. Llayl was having none of that. He caught Parthavoh’s hand again, unbent the fingers, and tucked the palm against the curve of his throat. He never took his eyes from Parthavoh’s face.

Parthavoh’s thoughts threatened to scatter. He struggled on. “I’m not asking if—about anything before, alright? Going forward, if you tell me you can’t make it to me, then I’m gonna believe you. Because I know you’re gonna remember me saying so.” He swallowed, freed his hand once more, and held it out to shake. “Deal?”

Llayl looked from the hand to Parthavoh and back again. He took it, brought it to his face, and kissed the palm twice. “Deal,” he murmured.

Of course, that was when Llayl’s comm beeped for attention. He kept hold of Parthavoh’s hand while he answered—audio only—but after a few words his face went blank. All Parthavoh could hear on the other end was a static gabble. Llayl only said “Yes,” then “yes” again, then “Not yet. I’ll check in within ten.” Another burst of speech, to which he replied smilingly, “Are you that eager for violence?” But the humor didn’t reach his eyes.

He ended the call and turned to Parthavoh, and everything they had just been saying hung in the air between them like a blaster to the head.

Llayl sank back on his heels. His fingers slid out of Parthavoh’s to land limply on his knees. “And now the test,” he said quietly, haggardly.

But if you couldn’t be kind to someone you loved, then what was the point? You found a pardon inside yourself and you took your finger off the trigger.

“Hey, mind helping me get this stim off before you go? It’s clearly doing a number on my systems.”

“I might be able to patch into the briefing from here. There shouldn’t be a security concern, since you were on the original roster…”

Parthavoh waved away the suggestion. “Don’t bother. Just stay with me until I conk out. Shouldn’t be long.” If he were lucky, while he was asleep he’d forget how Llayl had relaxed the instant he heard the offer of escape. Or his traitor brain’s suggestion that Llayl found it easier to make decisions with Parthavoh asleep, removed from immediate relevance, the same way he could reconcile Parthavoh’s theoretical death but not tangible danger. “You’ve got active duty calling you right now. Focus on the mission. Don’t fuck it up thinking about this. Watch out for my troops and kick some pirate ass. Got it?”

Llayl nodded slowly, distracted. He went over to the droid and gave it a hushed command. It busied itself at the terminal, then whirred out of the medbay on some unknown business. He returned to Parthavoh, who held up his splinted arm for access. Llayl took it. Then he glanced down at Parthavoh and smiled. “Do you want a kiss goodnight?”

“Oh, hell—” Parthavoh couldn’t help but laugh. “Is that why you got rid of the droid?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a disgrace to your order.” He cast an exasperated glance down at the blanket draped over his lap. “Don’t tease me.”

“I’m serious.” Llayl’s fingers tightened around Parthavoh’s wrist. “You’re not the only one who’s been waiting.”

Almost he went for it. Almost. But the amount of effort it had taken to lift his right arm made him reconsider. He heaved a sigh. “Come on, Llayl. I’m knocked halfway out of my head and trussed like an Endorian chicken.”

“Now who’s making it complicated?”

“If you get your kicks from me rigged like this, we need to talk, _Master Jedi._ ”

That won him a good, real laugh. But he’d hoped the absurdity would wipe that intent look from Llayl’s eyes, and if anything, it did the opposite. Llayl stood lightly, ready to move, tension building in his shoulders.

Parthavoh swore under his breath. “I have tubes coming out of my nose,” he told Llayl. “I could be drooling and not even know.”

“I don’t care. —I’d tell you.”

“Well, I do care. Look, Padawan—” hesitating slightly, knowing the Jedi Knight couldn’t have missed the slip, soldiering on regardless, “I can barely remember what it was like the first time, it went so fast. I want a _good_ memory to get all hot and bothered about. Not—not like this. I want kissing you to be the best memory I’ll ever have.”

He stopped there, certain his face was plenty crimson already. He was all too conscious of the dull drone of the machines pumping painkillers and kolto into him. Of the med droid, due back from its manufactured errand. Aware of how _little_ awareness he had of anything south of his ribs, and that Llayl had stopped smiling and let his long face lapse into that dark-eyed solemnity it was so perfectly suited for and which he rarely let show.

Llayl reached out to smooth his thumb over Parthavoh’s forehead. “My poor corporal,” he said softly, meeting him in the memory. He turned Parthavoh’s splinted arm upward to expose the vulnerable wrist. “It’s hard to want this much.”

And as Parthavoh drew in a breath to retort, Llayl stooped down and pressed a kiss, not on his lips, but on the place his thumb had brushed. Not a peck, either. A terribly tender, still, lingering kiss, held long enough for Parthavoh to hear him inhale.

While he did, his cold fingers slid along Parthavoh’s arm, under the splint. They found the edges of the stim patch and peeled the corners  away from his skin with little tugs.

Parthavoh broke out in goosebumps. Somehow his free hand had ended up between Llayl’s shoulderblades, gathering the fabric of his robe into a fist. He tilted his head back, wanting and not having, as Llayl laid the next kisses deliberately, one after another, on his temples—eyelids—the curve of each horn. The purposefulness with which he distributed them made Parthavoh wonder whether Llayl had been developing a list of his own, and what might be on it—

The jolt as the stim pulled free ran a cord straight to his stomach. Pins and needles followed. Llayl laid the arm down carefully and slid both hands around the back of Parthavoh’s neck. The familiar metallic chill of his prosthetics, the warm clean scent of his throat just barely out of reach, the unbearable gentleness of Llayl’s mouth against his skin—Parthavoh shut his eyes, but that was worse. The heat in them spilled over and ran down his temples, past his ears, and caught on Llayl’s fingers.

Llayl delivered one last featherlight brush of his lips to the swollen mess of Parthavoh’s nose, then pulled back. He gazed down at Parthavoh with his hands planted on either side of his head. The look on his face—so much love and chagrin, so much raw naked longing—silenced all Parthavoh’s questions.

Parthavoh blinked hard. At last he managed to say, not too hoarsely, “Do you save up all your fucking emotions to cash in on me?”

“Do you mind?”

He shook his head.

Llayl said simply, “Well, then,” and went on smiling at him, crinkle-eyed. That merciless, unmitigated look of affection was like looking into the glowing heart of a star.

* * *

“No, I’m afraid he’s still out cold, Master Jedi.”

A woman’s voice. No audible reply—just a faint crackling sound. A single set of footsteps approaching. “Yes, sir,” spoken closer. Then the _pip, pip, pip_ of a comm’s volume dial.

Parthavoh cracked an eyelid. Faint blue illumination. The medbay still. Private Atana stood over him. She was in battle dress, a little bandage stuck to her chin. She noticed his open eye and frowned. “Yes, sir,” she said again into the comm. And then to Parthavoh, softly, “It’s the Jedi Knight.”

As though he didn’t know. As though the one question foremost in his mind had not been answered already by that solitary tread.

He shut his eye again, fast, as the medbay blurred.

Atana laid the comm down on the pillow beside his head. It slid off. She grabbed it and wedged it more securely against his shoulder. She inhaled sharply as though to say something, but in the end only saluted, said “Sergeant,” and went out.

Parthavoh lay still. His heart pounded slow and heavy. Had it always been so heavy?

“Parthavoh. Do you hear me?” Llayl’s voice, filtered through Atana’s comm, was barely above a whisper. It reverberated oddly. At some distance, then, and a poor connection.

Medication and pain of several kinds pulled him down. He was tempted to let go, submerge. But through the comm he heard Llayl breathing, waiting, and he drew himself back together.

“Mm-hm.”

“We hit the pirate stronghold a few hours ago. The Jedi Council was right. One of their captains turned out to be a junior Sith Lord. She fled. The Empire has already declared her to be a rogue, not acting under their orders.”

“Mmph.”

“Well said. But we’re all so very civilized under our nice new treaty.” Parthavoh heard the wry smirk in his voice. “Two of the other Jedi are on their way back to Coruscant to testify.”

“Mm. You?”

“I’m in pursuit.” Llayl blew out a slow breath. “There was no other option. The others aren’t—They would be outmatched. As soon as we clear Tvanuk’s circumstellar disk we’ll go to lightspeed. Try to catch her before she gets into Imperial space.” He fell silent.

With each moment, the distance between them grew.

Parthavoh worked his sleep-stiffened jaw. He swallowed the lump in his throat and gagged when it tasted of clotted blood. “Two-Oh-Two?”

“No casualties.”

“Klev?”

“Corporal Kleveodi did you proud. —I’m so sorry, my friend. I tried.”

“I believe you,” he croaked, and did. He forced a smile, knowing Llayl would hear it in his voice, while his fist clenched around the sheet until it hurt. There was no one to fight here. Only life and its brutal suddenness. “Thanks for my troops. Better luck next time.”

He heard Llayl swear, muffled, far away. “I don’t like what I’m doing to you, Parthavoh.”

“Hey. You love me, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what you’re doing to me. ’S okay.” He half turned into the pillow, trying to wipe his face. At least Atana had the sense to give him privacy. When he turned to the other side, the cold lump of the comm dug into his cheek.  He kissed the receiver and caught a lipful of nasal tubing. “ ’S okay,” he repeated. “Just keep coming back to me. We’ll keep waiting.”

With his eyes closed, Parthavoh came unmoored from place and time. Llayl’s hushed voice in his ear drew him in. He followed the thread of sound through the comm, climbing into night, the planet far below and insignificant. Until the last switch was thrown and the ship dove into the star-streaked river between worlds, he listened to his lover breathe.

 


End file.
